Edition 18

Artificial realties, drugs direct, why tech teams keep failing and more.....

In recent news…..

Web4? Please no.

Like many, I stuck the Apple Vision Pro on my head this week and like all profound technology innovations, it put lots of good questions and thoughts in my head.

1. Half of me wants to not buy the new Apple Vision Pro because I fear I won’t use it all & it will gather dust after a few days next to my drone and 3D printer, the other half of me doesn’t want to buy it because I’ll be consumed by it and never leave the house. How people feel after 2 days is irrelevant, how are people using it after 2 months? 
   

2. The most significant media invented has slowly got closer to us, from the Cinema screen (1890’s)  to the TV (1930’s) to the Laptop (1980’s) to the Smartphone (2000’s) , and now a screen on your face. What we really see is the power of miniaturization.
   
   What we see are screens becoming more immersive, more interactive, but also far more of a barrier. There is something devastatingly sad about the idea of a device that can only ever be used by one person at a time, and in doing so they extract themselves from reality. Are we destined to see some tranches of the world more alone but connected than ever? I wrote here about this odd realization than were about to see even more people in a quasi wire headed state
   

3. The desire of the headset seems to be based on escapism. The device make no sense when you remove it to find yourself in a nice lounge with a decent TV set and a good soundbar, it makes far more sense if you remove it to see a damp problem, moldy pizza and nobody else. Unlike other devices that augment our lives, this replaces them. Is this more desirable to those with the worst realities?

4. Is this a good device to be more productive? Is it easier to work with 5 screens than 2? Is an excel spreadsheet with 20x100 cells on show a better way to see things? Are our jobs about more information or better information? We need to rethink workflows not bring out the full complexity into 3D form.  In some ways the AVP seems to be the opposite to many dynamics  of AI. AI is about doing things for you, removing things, automation, less, this seems about abundance. What jobs will be better done this way and how weird are they?

5. $3500 is a very very expensive piece of electronics, but it’s cheaper than moving out of your parents house. If the smartphone replaced maps, Walkmans, laptops, camcorders, GPS beacons, calculators. For some it replaces TV’s, walls, plants, doors, rooms, houses, vacations, friends, romantic partners, cities…… the world.

6. What about in ten years? Today I find the device absolutely stunning, totally majestic and generally unappealing. People say this is like the first Smartphone so imagine it in 10 years. This raises many questions.  If we assume the form factor changes to sunglasses, battery power becomes infinite, it becomes possible and socially acceptable to wear them outside, do I want that?  People use the easiest screen not the best one. We sit in front of massive OLED TV’s with wonderful Oscar winning films, then scroll mindlessly on TikTok and Instagram

7. Most tech doesn’t kill things, it adds to them, so what space it there for VR to fill? It was relatively easy for the iPhone to burst into our life because there was space, there were moments, we had time. The Apple Watch was able to fill little snatched moments, but the iPad never really took off because there wasn’t much of a space fill between Laptops and phones, it was mainly a device for kids from parents who didn’t want them to have a phone. It seems highly likely that 50% of VR headsets will end up soon as the most expensive thing in a drawer.

8. Contrary to popular belief, the iPhone didn’t change the world that much, it was the app store that did. The iPhone meant a large screen, touch interfaces, but the app store meant online banking, mobile payments, turn by turn directions, ordering cars with a fingerprint, buying coffee pods with your face. So what does the App Store for this end up meaning? A bit like the Apple Watch, I think the device has an unknown future and could take all sorts of directions we don't see coming.

Car crash in car sales sites - Why tech isn’t eating the world

Online Used Car dealer Vroom closed down it’s cars sales operations last month, a failure straddling two trend lines.

1. This is another failed SPAC. Somehow it appears that companies that wanted to cashout quickly & pass the bag to shareholders without facing SEC scrutiny, have largely turned out to be companies that were not very robust.  At least 21 SPAC’s went into bankruptcy in 2023 alone, wiping out $46bn of “value”.

2. Another “Used Car Sales disruptor” fails. Around 2014 a lot of people came up with the idea of using technology to “disrupt” used car buying, after all we had the Internet, cameras, and people hate used car dealers. From Beepi to Shift Technologies to Fair, to Carvana to Cazoo, billions were injected into very smart teams of people to make the market more efficient and speedy and nearly all have already failed.

The big one standing is Carvana , which is still “worth” $7.5bn, mostly likely priced on the collective hope that there is so much money in the Auto space, someone will end up buying them.

Carvana has never been able to come close to making a profit, despite the bananas, once in a lifetime auto gold rush of the pandemic, with the most ideal trading conditions for an online marketplace one could imagine. The UK’s cloned competition of Cazoo and Motorway face a similar futile future floating in the winds.

Just look at how bad SPAC’s have been

But the real trend these failures show is a point I will continue to harp on about time and time again.

All of these companies were founded and run by brilliant minds, untarnished by deep knowledge of the car selling world.

Each and every CEO, Founder, Operations leads or CMO we see them use, are fantastic raisers of money, or brilliant builders of Digital products, marvelous Tech minds, miracle workers of growth marketing, but they seem to know nothing about cars.

Car buying is horrible because that’s how they make money.

The 3 hours spent in a dark and gloomy miserable office discussing tire shield cover, or gap insurance, or Sparkle Sanitization for $900, isn’t their lack of interior design passion, or a failure to understand online order flows, it’s their way of making you wilt into submission. Car buying is essentially dark patterns in retail form. The balance is between pissing you off so much you walk away, but beating you up enough to show who is boss.

The car market isn’t about selling cars, its about exploiting ignorance, it’s about monetizing impatience, it’s about after sales, trade ins, servicing, financial products.

Time and time again people come into industries with no regard for the people who’ve made boatloads of cash in them. The people flying G650’s across Omaha to tour their dealerships are not ignorant to the internet, but knew there was margin in mystery, and profit in inefficiencies, and they laughed every time someone thought the business was about speed and CX.

Now this is not to say the market will stay this way, it’s not to say no Tech driven company can ever dominate a legacy field, I believe the opposite to this. You need tech knowledge, you need audacity, you need naivety, but you also need some general understanding of that industry.

Next time you see a Neobank with nobody from Banking, a healthcare startup with no doctors, a Web3 timeshare firm with no Hospitality people, spare a thought for them.

Commercial Break

I'm doing a free webinar about transformational thinking on March 13th sign up on the link here.

This is with the same people who made my excellent digital training course.

Slim as a Service

Eli Lilly has surpassed Tesla in market cap, becoming the 8th largest company in the S&P 500. Its market value has increased from $100 billion to over $600 billion in less than five years, thanks to the promise of Zepbound as a way to help people lose weight ( like Ozempic )

As I’ve said before, $1000 a month to get thin is a great business plan, $1000 or else you’ll get fat again, is unparalleled.

But what interests me most is that they are now selling direct to consumer. In the US it’s deemed illegal for alcoholic drinks companies to sell direct, or car makers to bypass another layer, but somehow making and selling prescription drugs is fine.

We’re seeing healthcare slowly blur, where Wellness, Consumer Healthcare, Surgery, Nutrition, Beauty, all start to converge. Lots of interesting new dynamics ahead.

Podcast O’rama

I’ve been churning out some great podcasts for Euronews and said I’d share them widely and haven’t.

This is the best one to date IMHO, how Robots will build a new world.

View it here

Quite a long one this week, hope you liked it.

Tom