With the seemingly endless stories of cloud hacking and technology malfunctions, I have become interested in what lies in the future for the technology sector. As the technology bubble burst close to 20 years ago, the technology industry has grown to exponential heights with (systematically) little getting in its way. Operationally speaking, the tech industry has significant variability; for example who would have predicted BlackBerry’s fall from grace. After reading classmate Andres Garza’s blogpost about the recent catastrophe’s of Samsung Galaxy S7, it left me wondering: how will the landscape for technology innovation pan out over the course of the next decade?
With regards to the Samsung predicament, Andres found it “perplexing that a brand as giant and well-established as Samsung went so catastrophically wrong”. I do ultimately agree; Samsung is one of the most established and stable technology brands; how could this kind of operational terror evolve. This leads into an unsettling topic about the ‘un-guaranteed safety of technology’. For example, this issue finds much attention with regards to cloud services and the ownership of the internet itself. A current debate that has sparked political controversy in the U.S. is the governments plan to “end its oversight of the internet’s master directory of website addresses”. This plan has sparked political opposition, particularly senator Ted Cruz who say that this move could give considerable influence over the internet to countries like Iran, Russia and China, jeopardizing the internets security.
Personally, I think that as globalization homogenizes the technology industry and the internet, there will be a significantly large degree of variability. Looking at precedent – companies like Nortel, RadioShack, Netscape, BlackBerry – there is a great degree of uncertainty with regards to stability. As classmate Jeremy Jersic has observed, Google has released its new phone in convenient timing with the Samsung predicament. He thinks that “Whether or not the release of the Pixel was planned by Google, it was an exceptional opportunity they capitalized on”. I think that what Jeremy pointed out is an example of an industry shakeout, and it is what will define the technology industry for years to come. An interesting observation I made while researching the technology industry is that there are low barriers to entry; anything can happen within the course of a short time. This can be seen in contrast to industries that produce staple products, and therefore are very stable. In my opinion, the future landscape of the technology industry will drastically reshaped over the course of the decade. I think we will see many firms implode as others innovatively emerge.
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Sources:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/jeremyjersic/
https://www.instagram.com/theonion/?hl=en