2015. My eleventh year of making predictions. Seems everyone’s gotten onto this particular bus, and I’m now late to the party – I never get around to writing till the weekend – when I have open hours in front of me, and plenty of time to contemplate That Which May Come.
There are several keys to getting predictions right. First, you need to pay attention to long term secular trends – big changes that have been in the works for a while. Second, you need to call the timing – will those trends break into the mainstream this coming year? Last year, for example, I predicted that 2014 would be the year that the Internet would “adopt the planet as its cause.” I think I was right on the secular trend, but utterly wrong on the timing.
Third, you need to pay attention to patterns that have yet to emerge, but have a high probability of breaking out in the near term. A good example of this is my declaring that Twitter would become a major media platform three years ago.
So what might happen in 2015? The year to come feels clearer to me than 2014, which I labeled “A Difficult Year To See.” Plenty of interesting technology, Internet, and media trends seem poised to break out in 2015. Here’s my cut at them.
1. Uber will begin to consolidate its namesake position in the ” The Uber-ization of everything” trend.When we think of Uber, we think of black cars, of getting around from one place to another. But Uber has the brand permission to expand its brand to mean more than transportation. If you think of Uber as a company that takes a previously expensive, complicated, and inefficient process and leverages the Internet, mobile devices, the 1099 economy, and logistics to create a 10X better offering, there’s no reason the company won’t identify and pick off one or more similar markets in 2015. Uber is already making moves in delivery, a natural adjacency, but I imagine the company may either buy or build its way into markets that feel – at least initially – a bit further afield.
2. Related, Uber will be the center of a worldwide conversation about the impact of tech and business culture on the world. Put another way, Uber will replace Google, Facebook, and Apple as the centerpiece of a debate around the change wrought by the powerful tincture of technology and capitalism. This has already begun, of course, but 2015 will be when it comes to a dramatic head. I’m not quite sure how, but it’ll be obvious when it happens.
3. Google will face existential competition from Facebook due to Facebook’s Atlas offering, to the point where Google will find a way to connect its search and personal data to its Doubleclick asset. This will require changes to long-held pillars of its Privacy Policy – and thanks to legal complications from its search near-monoply, these changes will be tortured and painful. But in the faec of Facebook’s superior personalization capabilities, Google will have no choice. Google has long owned web advertising through its consolidation of a universal adtech stack. It’s the default platform for both publishers and advertisers, the 900-pound gorilla of ad serving, measurement, and delivery. But Facebook is attacking Google head on here with a rebuilt Atlas product that allows advertisers to target users of its ubiquitous service across the web. It will take time for Atlas to grow into meaningful market share, but advertisers love high quality personalization, and that’s what Facebook offers. Google’s in a difficult position here – its privacy position was crafted for a world where there was no meaningful competition in web advertising. Now there is. The phrase to watch is this one: “We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent.”
4. The Apple Watch will be seen as a success. I know, I know, I’m wandering into a morass here, as many others have already predicted that the watch will or will not work in 2015. But the use case, to me, is simply too strong to ignore, and I believe Apple will be first to prove it. I think Fred’s post was misunderstood, he didn’t say Apple’s watch won’t succeed, he just said it won’t be an iPod, iPhone, or iPad. And he’s right – no way will Apple sell as many units as those hits. We’re talking fashion here, and not everyone wants an Apple on their wrist. But I think we’re all ready to stop pulling out our phone every time we get a new text, email, or social media update. And for a significant number of folks, the Apple Watch will be how we change that behavior.
5. And Apple Pay will not. Apple Pay is slick, and it works, according to those I’ve talked with (I don’t use an iPhone, so I am certainly at a disadvantage here). But I’m basing this prediction on my sense of market need – does the market need a new way to pay? I’m not certain the current system – credit cards, cash – is so inefficient that it will motivate consumers to switch en masse this year, and for Apple Pay to be a success, I think that has to happen. I’m not saying the service won’t show good uptake and growth, it most likely will. But until there’s an orthogonal reason to use it that gives us all a much stronger value proposition, I don’t think Apple Pay will take over the world. In five years, I’d say the reverse will be true, but by then, we’ll have universal expenditure tracking and integration with a larger ecosystem of financial management tools, an ecosystem that is still underdeveloped and fractured at the moment.
6. But Beacons will re-emerge and take root. Remember iBeacons? They created quite a fuss when launched some 18 months ago, but since then, no one’s really paid them much nevermind. That will change in 2015 as ambient intelligence starts to be part of the fabric of everyday life. By year’s end, beacons will be a red hot market, and a platform for many a startup funding round.
7. Google’s Nest will build or buy a scaled home automation service business. Nest is a home automation business, but it’s also invested in rolling trucks to help its consumers install its growing suite of gadgets. Why stop there? The modern home is now a complicated mess of mismatched technology – there’s spotty wifi that works in one room but not another, dumb phone systems that don’t integrate with anything, and AV systems that break down more than they work. Shouldn’t someone 10X the home technology platform? Yes! And Nest is the brand with permission to do just that. It won’t hurt that by becoming the best home system integrator in the world, Nest will sell a shit-ton of its own devices.
8. A breakout healthcare startup will emerge in the consumer consciousness.Hard to say which one, as there are a ton of them, but the time is ripe for a startup to breakout that changes how we view our relationship to health data and services. One such startup will become the darling of the press and the exemplar of how healthcare services “should work.”
9. A breakout mobile startup will force us to rethink the mobile user interface.The time feels right for a new approach to mobile interfaces, and tons of startups are busy rethinking the space (see my posts on the subject here). I’m not predicting that the “chiclet-ized” approach to apps and OSes will break down in 2015, that’d be too much change to happen in one year. But as with healthcare above, a startup will break out that opens the industry’s eyes to new ways of interacting with our mobile devices. It’s about time.
10. At least one hotly-anticipated IPO will fizzle, leading many to declare that the “tech correction” has begun. Will it be Box, Dropbox, or Square? Spotify, Pinterest, or even Uber? I don’t know, but with so many deeply funded startups in the IPO zone, and our current tech boom entering its fifth year, the cycle is poised to pendulate. And yes, I just used “pendulate” for the first time in my writing life.
11. China will falter. This may be controversial, but again, using my keys of “secular trends, timing, and emerging trends,” it strikes me that China is due for a correction of its own. The US tech markets have a complicated and fractious relationship with China, and now that Alibaba is public and reportedly acquisitive, all manner of issues will be forced to the front burner. The Valley is anticipating a flood of Chinese tech competition and lucre in 2015, and I can’t imagine this comes without policy ramifications. Used to be, China regularly spied on US corporations, and we shrugged it off. No more. China is widely understood to have a brittle, centrally controlled, and deeply corrupt power structure. I expect this mix of illegal behavior (the spying and corruption) and easy money will cause powerful companies in the US to lobby Washington for relief, and I expect Washington will be willing to take action. One to watch, to be sure.
12. Adtech comes back. Adtech, a sector that took a beating this past year, will once again be seen as a strong, investable market. The sector has matured, and is no longer dominated by one-note business models dependent on a culture of fraud. This trend has already begun to play out with acquisitions in 2014 – LiveRamp, Datalogix, Blue Kai come to mind. With major players like Oracle, Salesforce, Facebook, Adobe, SAP, IBM and Google battling it out over marketing automation, it’ll be a very good year to be a differentiated adtech startup.
Well, there’s a dozen predictions for you, and I feel like I could do another twelve. But I think I’ll leave it there, and leave it to the fates to see how I did in one year’s time. Happy New Year everyone, and here’s to a great 2015!
(Cross posted from Searchblog)
