The biggest question the month of October raised, for most of us at least, is what’s happening to tech. The answer, of course, is that a lot is happening, and most of that is what’s been predictable from the first. All hype waves hit the beach, and in October we’ve seen a lot of beaching. More is to come, so is tech doomed? The good news is that tech might emerge healthier than ever.
I have to admit being frustrated by the way that tech media and even the financial media has treated the sector over the last couple decades. Tech media’s reason is simple; “news” means “novelty” and so there’s positive reinforcement to cover things in a way that sensationalize them, simply because people are more likely to click on an attractive exaggeration (or lie, if you prefer) than on the objective truth. The financial markets’ reason is also simple; you make money on bubbles, so stories that justify them are going to be promoted and expanded upon. We’re not going to change either tendency, so we have to accept that there will be turmoil now and then, and this is one of those turmoil times.
The issue of hype is pervasive and we can’t examine all its impacts, but there’s also more to this than just hype. To find out just what’s going on, let’s focus on three areas in particular. Those are 5G, the cloud, and the metaverse. You can apply the lessons of those spaces to all other spaces, and each of these spaces can teach us something about the future.
Why promote sunrise; it’s going to happen anyway. 5G is also inevitable, in all its various forms and with all its components. The need for improved mobile broadband drives a requirement to make each cell capable of not only higher speeds per user, but also higher capacity for all users being served there. People want to do video, HD video, on their phones, and operators who can’t support that would suffer. Thus, 5G deploys, and there should never have been a question of that.
The problem is that if we say that 5G is going to prepare for more customers and will help sustain and even lower overall mobile broadband costs, nobody reads the articles. If we claim it will revolutionize networking, change how we live, they’ll eat it up. You can guess where this leads us, but to make it explicit, I’m saying that there was never any real reason to believe that simply deploying 5G could raise overall mobile broadband revenue levels. There still isn’t, and so we’re already seeing stories about 5.5G and 6G. Go far enough into the future and you can make any claims you like and keep pushing them until the future becomes the present. Then move on to another claim. Expect nothing revolutionary to come of any of this.
What’s missing in 5G is some specific mission that people would pay for. Even if 5G raises per-user broadband speed, the difference isn’t noticeable for most people because video is the big consumer of bandwidth and limited display capabilities on mobile devices make it nearly impossible to see differences in delivery rate once you can keep up with the frame changes. We can say that 5G is a victim of its own hype, because everyone involved took the easy way out to get publicity and never faced the need to develop a new mission, which really means a new set of mobile applications. It’s what you do with 5G that makes it valuable, and that’s our first lesson.
Now, the cloud. Anyone with a good statistics program could have found that most corporate data centers could achieve economies of scale within a couple percent of what cloud providers could achieve. Thus, since cloud providers expect to earn a profit on services, simple replacement of a data center server with a cloud server couldn’t possibly make financial sense. We’re seeing all sorts of stories in all sorts of places, tech and financial, that are now questioning the economics of the cloud.
But does this mean the whole cloud story was a vast corporate error? No, it means that we didn’t take the time to understand what was really driving the cloud. Moving everything to the cloud could never make sense. What does make sense is to use the cloud’s elastic resources model to address applications that have highly variable demand. Those applications can’t be efficiently supported in the data center because sizing compute resources for the peaks would reduce efficiency too much.
This sort of variable-demand mission is characteristic of the user front-end piece of almost all applications. The cloud has deployed because of that, because we’ve become dependent on online information, ordering, and support. But what happens as we use up those applications, as we deploy the cloud for a larger and larger percentage of the applications that justify it? Answer: Cloud growth slows, which is that we’re seeing and what’s now being acknowledged by Wall Street.
The solution? It’s the same thing that’s the solution to the 5G challenge, it’s applications. If we want to see more cloud, we need to see more applications whose front-end needs justify the cloud’s specific features. That means we have to find a different mission, a broader mission, for hosted software in our businesses and our lives. I believe that this could have been started two decades ago, because I believe that the signs of the future were visible, even clear, then. We didn’t start it then, and until we do we’re going to have to face the fact that hype waves break eventually.
To face the future effectively, we can’t rely on being able to define every possible new application. What we can do is to define the application model that most of these new applications would be based on, and I believe that model is the model of the “digital twin.” Yes, I know that some people I like and respect have recently deprecated the concept on LinkedIn, but I persist for a reason.
Future applications that drive accelerated investment in tech will have to follow the approach of past applications, and move information technology closer to our lives. The next step in doing that is to start modeling our subjective reality in digital terms, and using that model to offer us different tools to face the real world. In order to do that, we have to represent elements of the real world in digital form, so we can use that representation to facilitate realizing peoples’ individual roles, individual needs.
This is the meat of a real “metaverse” concept, or rather it should be. Any “metaverse” is an alternate reality, and any alternate reality has to connect in some way to the real world to make it believable. That means there has to be at least a limited digital twinning, a synchronization. The metaverse model is the general approach to that, period. Whatever drives 5G or the cloud in application terms, the model is going to end up having digital twinning and metaverse elements.
Why, then, is Meta such a mess? We could personalize and say “Zuckerberg”. We could generalize and say “tunnel vision”. Both would be accurate. Zuckerberg is no Steve Jobs, no person of enviable vision. He may also be why such a person doesn’t really have much sway at Facebook, and the lack of insightful leadership has limited if not doomed their chances of making the metaverse a success. But the real problem is that we, as an industry, haven’t looked at the metaverse model at all. We postulate the result in the social-media space, but without looking at the pieces that have to make up and support that result.
Meta’s metaverse is messed up because it doesn’t have a model, only a goal. We want virtual reality to be the basis of a new social network paradigm that will somehow erase TikTok’s (and others’) gains and make us king again. We don’t know how, exactly, to do that, but we need it to happen so we’ll throw billions against the wall and hope somebody figures it out so we can buy it or (better yet) copy it.
Why, though, are we trying to do metaverse without a model? Because the model is complicated and the broad market has no appetite for complicated things. Yes, hype is a part of it, but the root of it all lies in a pervasive attitude of complexity avoidance. We want things simple, digested into a couple hundred words, and something like a new application model to drive 5G, the cloud, and the metaverse just can’t be explained that way…not to the public or to Wall Street. Imagine Meta talking about what would really be involved in the metaverse (assuming they know) to Wall Street analysts or reporters. Even software architects would likely be challenged by the issue, and where can they go to get educated?
They may even have issues getting startup funding, because venture capital is a bubble-and-hype game too. Meta’s problems are opportunities because they mean that the real metaverse is yet to be described. However, what VCs want is for a metaverse hype wave to drive both IPOs and acquisitions, and Meta is making that very unlikely. The question for the market is whether a VC, a startup, or another tech giant (like Google or Microsoft), will see the right approach and implement it. IBM, hardly the poster child for innovation in the mass market, gave us the PC that drove the last real tech revolution. Might they give us the tools for the next? Even the telcos might have a role, because it seems certain that edge computing on a large scale will be needed, and “telco cloud” could give us that.
Will operators’ reluctance to move beyond simple connection services keep them out of the cloud? Whether it does or not likely depends on AT&T’s notion of “facilitating services”, a model where an operator creates not the top-level retail information/content services but the critical components they need. Because operators have a lower internal rate of return, they can invest at lower ROIs than the OTTs, than big tech, and this means they can create a role for themselves that’s at the boundary between the future—which requires innovation—and the connection—which can never again be really profitable.
The good news is that, behind the scenes and with generally low levels of efficiency, we’re making incremental progress in framing the kind of software architecture that we need. We don’t know it’s a unified architecture yet, but if we hearken back to the story of the elephant behind the screen, we understand that one grope may not solve the whole problem of identification, but successive gropes will eventually let us get it right. We had nothing to support a digital-twin-metaverse concept a decade ago, and now what we lack is less the elements than the understanding of how to assemble them.
Somebody is going to get this right. They may become the next Apple, the next Facebook, the next Amazon, and even all of the above. Who will it be? We’ll probably get our first glimpse of the glorious elephant whole some time late next year.