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Without going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO didn’

Without going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO didn’t see the web, or mobile, or VoIP and other technologies rising. But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one — it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will be. Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how things will turn out.

Roritharr 7y ago
I find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous quotes where basically details were misjudged. I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different. This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.
- theferalrobot 7y ago
  As an aside and for my own curiosity, where do you think accounting software is going in the future? (It isn't my industry but I hear occasional mentions of it more frequently than I would expect)
  - Roritharr 7y ago
    Lot's of vertical integration & automation, with the depth depending on business size. There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting. I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring... Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road. I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic. I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Yes, I agree with this comment in it’s entirety, and I did imply — but didn’t mean to - that only top executives have this foresight.
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  How is this remotely true? Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.
- copperx 7y ago
  I'm curious about where the puck is going in accounting software. Can you expound on that?
- enjoy-your-stay 7y ago
  >when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses. What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.
gtirloni 7y ago
What do you attribute that to? Pure genius, more access to information, better associates, etc?
- dsiegel2275 7y ago
  Survivorship bias?
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  Isn't it also a bit self-fulfilling? You imagine what's next, and you steer your company in that direction in order to be ready for it. Doing so (and speaking about it, etc.) contributes heavily to it even happening. If you were wrong, and your company disappears as a result, that contributes to us not analyzing it later.
  - Insanity 7y ago
    Ha yeah that was what I was thinking. Probably some survivorship bias in play here.
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Formative experiences hanging around the fringe - the Aspen Institute, PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, etc.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  My personal view is that it’s not hard to see where things are going, and anyone reasonably smart and informed will have a good sense of where things are generally headed. The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem. I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc
tyingq 7y ago
I was impressed with this video as well. It's years before soap, rest, JSON, xmlhttprequest, etc. He's describing the end state very well.
Existenceblinks 7y ago
Sure, these executives have power to drive and make it happens. Especially they are the leads of tech industry, .. and not doubt you could find an exception among executives of big tech companies.
delinka 7y ago
My sibling comments seem to all want to attribute this foresight to Jobs alone. Jobs had an organization of designers and engineers informing him. Not only informing, but collaborating. He’d express a vision, others would help shape and hone based on existing tech, or based on how they could build new tech, and eventually Jobs would present the vision and solution publicly. And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.
- holoduke 7y ago
  That's with virtually every thing in the world. It's never a true single man show. The great thing about jobs and similar people is that they can effectively let people work together with all having a common shared belief.
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Jobs on several occasions ended keynotes by mentioning the various teams and leaders involved in the announced products. I do see though the perception of it being a one man show, as he spent so much of the time presenting.
- davidy123 7y ago
  "Great artists steal." Jobs identified an overall vision that was something like "to sell great technology." This later became refined into something that was a little "different" as Apple latched onto the "better alternative" image when confronted with clone PCs. Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.
fraggle222 7y ago
Is this foresight a function of the CEO themselves or more of being in that position (ceo of a technology company). In other words, being in that role you have time and resources to think about "what is next?" also this is somewhat expected from the board and investors. How much of their insight comes from others (eg. senior staff, acquisition targets, etc.) and how much from their own noggin so to speak? Or a better way to ask this might be, how would one go about replicating this insight if one is not a CEO of a tech company? What resources would I need to pull in, who should I be talking with?
- tcbawo 7y ago
  Speaking from limited experience, executives are surrounded by people giving them distilled insight and knowledge. They sit at the top of the meritocracy, although not everyone in that position has earned their place through that meritocracy.
klhugo 7y ago
What about self driving vehicles? Many "big time CEOs" saw it comming. They not always "see" it right. It is tough to forecast future in tech.
hodgesrm 7y ago
CEOs can get the market very wrong. Boeing developed the 787 to meet a vision of point-to-point long-range flight using smaller aircraft that could fly out of medium-sized airports with high load factors. Airbus bet on hub-and-spoke and developed the A380, which turned out to be a substantial misreading of the future.

Roritharr 7y ago

I find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous quotes where basically details were misjudged. I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different. This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.

theferalrobot 7y ago
As an aside and for my own curiosity, where do you think accounting software is going in the future? (It isn't my industry but I hear occasional mentions of it more frequently than I would expect)
- Roritharr 7y ago
  Lot's of vertical integration & automation, with the depth depending on business size. There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting. I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring... Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road. I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic. I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.
omarhaneef 7y ago
Yes, I agree with this comment in it’s entirety, and I did imply — but didn’t mean to - that only top executives have this foresight.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
How is this remotely true? Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.
copperx 7y ago
I'm curious about where the puck is going in accounting software. Can you expound on that?
enjoy-your-stay 7y ago
>when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses. What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.

gtirloni 7y ago

What do you attribute that to? Pure genius, more access to information, better associates, etc?

dsiegel2275 7y ago
Survivorship bias?
hunter2_ 7y ago
Isn't it also a bit self-fulfilling? You imagine what's next, and you steer your company in that direction in order to be ready for it. Doing so (and speaking about it, etc.) contributes heavily to it even happening. If you were wrong, and your company disappears as a result, that contributes to us not analyzing it later.
- Insanity 7y ago
  Ha yeah that was what I was thinking. Probably some survivorship bias in play here.
Austin_Conlon 7y ago
Formative experiences hanging around the fringe - the Aspen Institute, PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, etc.
omarhaneef 7y ago
My personal view is that it’s not hard to see where things are going, and anyone reasonably smart and informed will have a good sense of where things are generally headed. The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem. I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc

tyingq 7y ago

I was impressed with this video as well. It's years before soap, rest, JSON, xmlhttprequest, etc. He's describing the end state very well.

Existenceblinks 7y ago

Sure, these executives have power to drive and make it happens. Especially they are the leads of tech industry, .. and not doubt you could find an exception among executives of big tech companies.

delinka 7y ago

My sibling comments seem to all want to attribute this foresight to Jobs alone. Jobs had an organization of designers and engineers informing him. Not only informing, but collaborating. He’d express a vision, others would help shape and hone based on existing tech, or based on how they could build new tech, and eventually Jobs would present the vision and solution publicly. And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.

holoduke 7y ago
That's with virtually every thing in the world. It's never a true single man show. The great thing about jobs and similar people is that they can effectively let people work together with all having a common shared belief.
Austin_Conlon 7y ago
Jobs on several occasions ended keynotes by mentioning the various teams and leaders involved in the announced products. I do see though the perception of it being a one man show, as he spent so much of the time presenting.
davidy123 7y ago
"Great artists steal." Jobs identified an overall vision that was something like "to sell great technology." This later became refined into something that was a little "different" as Apple latched onto the "better alternative" image when confronted with clone PCs. Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.

fraggle222 7y ago

Is this foresight a function of the CEO themselves or more of being in that position (ceo of a technology company). In other words, being in that role you have time and resources to think about "what is next?" also this is somewhat expected from the board and investors. How much of their insight comes from others (eg. senior staff, acquisition targets, etc.) and how much from their own noggin so to speak? Or a better way to ask this might be, how would one go about replicating this insight if one is not a CEO of a tech company? What resources would I need to pull in, who should I be talking with?

tcbawo 7y ago
Speaking from limited experience, executives are surrounded by people giving them distilled insight and knowledge. They sit at the top of the meritocracy, although not everyone in that position has earned their place through that meritocracy.

klhugo 7y ago

What about self driving vehicles? Many "big time CEOs" saw it comming. They not always "see" it right. It is tough to forecast future in tech.

hodgesrm 7y ago

CEOs can get the market very wrong. Boeing developed the 787 to meet a vision of point-to-point long-range flight using smaller aircraft that could fly out of medium-sized airports with high load factors. Airbus bet on hub-and-spoke and developed the A380, which turned out to be a substantial misreading of the future.