(Thomson Reuters)
These are the quiet times.
From April to June, tech's biggest companies all held their annual mega-events, laying out their grand visions for the next 12 months or so.
Facebook kicked it off in late April with its F8 conference, followed by Microsoft Build, then the Google I/O conference, and Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference finished things off. Amazon doesn't really hold events, but it unveiled two new Amazon Echo smart speakers during that period for good measure.
And things will get exciting again, sooner than you know it. This Fall, Apple is expected to reveal a 10th-anniversary iPhone, Google will likely reveal a revamped Pixel smartphone, and Microsoft is expected to hold another one of its regular late-October Surface computer press conferences.
In the meantime, there's not much to do but reflect on what we've learned so far this year about the future of tech. And beyond the hype and the hyperbole, we're starting to see the very earliest stages of a battle for the next phase of computing.
Because while Apple and Google may dominate the smartphone market today, technologies like augmented reality present whole-new platforms where there's no clear winner. So Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, having missed out on owning a mobile platform, are doing their damndest to hasten the end of the smartphone — and the end of Apple and Google's duopoly, while they're at it.
Skin in the game
Every major technological shift has created big opportunities for the few entrepreneurs who see it coming early — in the seventies, Apple and Microsoft made big bets that the PC would be a much bigger market than gigantic room-sized mainframes, while the mainframe industry decried the PC itself as a fad. We see who won that one.
Similarly, Microsoft didn't fully realize the potential of smartphones, until well after Google and Apple proved them wrong. Now, Google's Android is the most popular operating system in the world, full stop. And the iPhone has propelled Apple to record profits and to the status as the company to beat in tech.
Well, it seems like time is a flat circle. Right now, we're seeing the earliest growing pains of augmented reality and virtual reality — tech that overlays the digital world onto our human senses. It means information, projected into your eyes and ears, as you need it. Why carry a phone when Netflix and WhatsApp are floating in front of you?
(Apple ARkit allows apps to overlay digital imagery into the real world.Made With ARKit)
Some call it a fad, or just something that's too new and untested to be considered a real threat to the smartphone. And yet, there's a veritable arms race to build these augmented reality platforms of the future.