Each of those bring massive high-margin software tides to ride.
In practice, life's still pretty sweet for cloud/gpu/ai startups, so we still seem to be roughly at that point. (We do a lot of gpu cloud accelerated security/fraud visual graph analytics: most enterprises still do it on-prem and basically just hope splunk can run regex without dying.) In GPU land, it's pretty clear they're being way underutilized, esp. due to slow SW rollout by various incumbents like cloud vendors.
We're still early on the transition to the next phase. The blockchain/vr/quantum startups raised a ton of funding, but have largely fallen flat. Some of the fundamentals in them seem sound, so they seem more of a matter of being early, not necessarily wrong. Current teams just couldn't get the tech together, or a true killer app: those are a question of time. Likewise, we know quantum etc. are coming, just need ~5 more years for what most general sw people start to get into.
IMO bigger risk is monopolies. Maybe the market reasoning is more from VC perspective, where everything feels 'expensive', and SaaS metrics era made investors forget how to take tech risks while the coming gen of platforms emerge.
EDIT: Some other potential near-term up-and-comers - synthetic bio (crispr,..), NN moving into program synthesis (so past perception and into automation), serverless. I don't follow agtech, but drones/robots/etc. are increasingly here.
Self-driving cars ought to be big, though. Sooner or later, someone will get it right.
The Next Big Thing is probably wind and solar + batteries. Bye bye, gasoline industry. In twenty years, you may need to plan out a route in advance to be sure of finding an open gasoline station. Heating oil will last longer.
VR has gone from 0.3% to 1.5% of all users on Steam in one year, and still rising. I'm old enough to remember people saying that both mice and gfx cards weren't worth the money and never would be. Dismissing VR as a "dud" is... well, foolish :-)
VR isn't "3D TV". It's only going to become more commonplace as the tech and UX improves.
Based on limited experience, albeit going back about 30 years, VR won't become popular before visual and proprioceptive inputs can be synched. And I doubt that'll be practical before direct brain input works well.
About blockchain, it'll succeed once users don't know that it's there. I mean, how many understand how HTTPS certificates work?
Funny you mention HTTPS certificates because there's a blockchain-based protocol that's trying to create a decentralized certificate authority. It basically aims to shift the root of trust from CAs to the blockchain https://handshake.org
Orchid creates multi-hop VPN connections using servers from multiple providers. It uses a private blockchain cryptocurrency to ~anonymously distribute value from users to VPN providers. That's useful because users don't need to trust any single VPN service.
Loki is an onion network. Currently the Session messaging app is the only service implemented, but I gather that there will be others. Loki uses a private blockchain cryptocurrency to hinder Sibyl attacks. That's useful because users will less likely get pwned by malicious nodes.
If those work out, there's no reason why most users would need to even know that blockchain cryptocurrencies were involved.
> In twenty years, you may need to plan out a route in advance to be sure of finding an open gasoline station. Heating oil will last longer.
Huh, why? In many countries you're not allowed build new homes with oil heating systems, and there are plenty of government scheme to get rid of existing examples. And of course in highly urbanized countries heating oil barely exists anyway (it hasn't made sense for a long time if mains gas is available).
mainframe -> pc -> laptop -> phone -> cloud/gpu/ai -> blockchain/vr/... -> quantum/self-driving-car/... .
Each of those bring massive high-margin software tides to ride.
In practice, life's still pretty sweet for cloud/gpu/ai startups, so we still seem to be roughly at that point. (We do a lot of gpu cloud accelerated security/fraud visual graph analytics: most enterprises still do it on-prem and basically just hope splunk can run regex without dying.) In GPU land, it's pretty clear they're being way underutilized, esp. due to slow SW rollout by various incumbents like cloud vendors.
We're still early on the transition to the next phase. The blockchain/vr/quantum startups raised a ton of funding, but have largely fallen flat. Some of the fundamentals in them seem sound, so they seem more of a matter of being early, not necessarily wrong. Current teams just couldn't get the tech together, or a true killer app: those are a question of time. Likewise, we know quantum etc. are coming, just need ~5 more years for what most general sw people start to get into.
IMO bigger risk is monopolies. Maybe the market reasoning is more from VC perspective, where everything feels 'expensive', and SaaS metrics era made investors forget how to take tech risks while the coming gen of platforms emerge.
EDIT: Some other potential near-term up-and-comers - synthetic bio (crispr,..), NN moving into program synthesis (so past perception and into automation), serverless. I don't follow agtech, but drones/robots/etc. are increasingly here.