When I was growing up in the 1980s, we had a set of Britannica encyclopedias on the bookshelf in the living room. If I had a question about an animal, country, disease, or anything else, that’s where I could go to try to find an answer.
Despite being thousands of pages, the explanations weren’t in-depth, weren’t updated, and often what I was looking for wasn’t there.
The next step was going to the public library a few blocks away. And I never quite got the hang of searching their catalog system.
If you weren’t alive then, it’s hard to explain just how hard it was to find information.
Sometime in the late 1980s, we got a computer with MS-DOS.
In the early 1990s, that computer could access the internet through a service called Prodigy. Suddenly, you could get the weather 24/7, not just at 5:17 on the evening news (IYKYK).
Eventually, AOL replaced Prodigy.
In college, the beep-bop-boop of dial-up internet was replaced by fiber, and my mind was blown. We would play multi-player video games with dozens of players, race to see who could download songs fastest on Napster, and message anyone anywhere in the world.
Around 2005, the rotary phone I grew up with was replaced by a phone in my pocket.
By 2009, I had an $Apple(AAPL)$ iPhone that could access a million times more information than the encyclopedias I grew up with in seconds.
In 20 years, we went from very few PCs to PCs in our pockets with the world’s information at our fingertips.
And every one of these steps was OBVIOUSLY 10x better than the previous paradigm.
As we get to the next stage of hardware and software, which is being introduced today, is it OBVIOUSLY better? Or is it just different and incremental?
More on that in a moment.
The Age of Incrementalism
If you were around in the 1980s and 1990s, you remember how revolutionary every new technology product was.
Computers improved so quickly that by the time you drove out of the $Best Buy(BBY)$ parking lot, your computer was obsolete.
Last week was a reminder that, despite all of the talk about AI and the trillions of dollars being invested, life is pretty similar to what it looked like 15 years ago. $Apple(AAPL)$ ( ▼ 1.0% ), long known as one of the most innovative companies in the world, introduced a $300 iPad with a speaker that (somehow) needs to be plugged into the wall! This is a cool FaceTime device, but do you think my kids can sit still next to an outlet to use this?
Apple also introduced “Home” products like a doorbell and cameras that seem like they belonged in a 2015 keynote.
$Tesla Motors(TSLA)$ ( ▲ 1.54% ) showed off a “flying” car in what may have been the coolest demo ever, before everyone realized this is a completely impractical product and isn’t going to be sold…ever.
And let’s not forget that the most valuable automaker in the world is selling fewer vehicles than it did in 2023.
Even EVs weren’t a revolution in transportation. They changed the drivetrain from gasoline to electricity, a change that’s…incremental.
We could talk about the failure of VR, which I experienced personally, and how wearables have been anything but a revolution. Even Meta spending billions on glasses has only made it a fringe product for the techie crowd.
Maybe that’s why I’m excited about Joby. This is a product that’s anything but incremental, even if it isn’t yet commercially viable.
I write this today because I want you to be skeptical that any new product is truly the “next big thing.”
The PC was incredibly obvious the moment it came out.
So was the internet.
So was the mobile phone.
And the iPhone.
I see fewer “obvious” wins today.
AI agents, like $Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ Muse? Meh…
Jumping cars? No!
AI glasses? Please, no!
Maybe I just happened to live through an age of incredible technology advancement and disruption, and we’re all searching for the next tech paradigm to disrupt the last.
And what we got was an age of incrementalism.
Which is fine. As long as you’re buying companies that benefit from incremental wins (Uber in autonomy, for example), and not paying technology revolution prices.
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