The new hardware era - what's it all about?

Another option is to reverse this, by offering hardware as a complement to an existing software business

I submit that we have two big biases when we talk about technology. First, we think about it too much in terms of tools and recipes, when really we should think about it more in terms of process knowledge and technical experience. Second, most of us focus too much on the digital world and not enough on the industrial world. Our obsession with the d... See more

We often assume that the world of today would stun a visitor from fifty years ago. In truth, for every miraculous iPad there are countless partly broken realities: WiFi passwords, connectivity, battery life, privacy and compatibility amongst others. The real skill of creating a compelling and engaging view of the future lies not in designing the gl... See more

“You're basically cramming all of these materials to build what we would've thought of as a supercomputer 10 years ago into the frame of glasses that are about five millimeters thick. … We tend to really celebrate things that are big, right? But I actually think miniaturizing things and getting a supercomputer to fit into a pair of glasses is actua... See more

In a 2010 essay, Chris Dixon wrote, "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Provocative. What he meant was that new technologies are often dismissed as toys because they undershoot user needs, and that that ones that make it out of toy phase and into the zeitgeist do so because they ride external forces.

Paul Graham points out something Fitbit, GoPro, and Sonos investors have also observed: hardware is hard.

When people ask, “why do we need new hardware?” The answer is quite simple...

It’s because we aren’t done figuring out how we can interact with computers. The optimist knows that it is worth searching for new land, because if we discover it, the other side is expanded opportunity.

Analogizing the current era in tech with the recent, software-dominated era is a mistake.

A much better analogy would be the Second Industrial Revolution in America, the Gilded Age when entrepreneurs built businesses using every new technological tool at their disposal to pull humanity to a new level of prosperity and became unbelievably rich in th... See more