Are you in or out?

Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, and Myspace.com

They are all gone, not totally, but almost.

They were the №1 industry leaders once and they failed cause they did not adapt fast enough.

This is exactly waking up tomorrow on the news of Apple is shutting down.

Let that sink in for a minute. Apple is shutting down.

No one, literally, no one is exempt from failing, yet, every underdog has the chance to make it.

We live in a time that we can not un-invent things, like we can’t undo social media or make smart phones go. They have become part of what we are ages ago and they got into our lives where they belong and where they are needed most. Connecting us together, sharing things, posting photos, and playing candy crush.

But the question that I always had when it comes to every tech invention is whether they were destined to be part of our evolution or we just simply adopted them as one?

My answer comes in two parts:

Part one Yes, we have adopted them because we found them useful and they worked just fine. Maybe at some point in the future we will ditch them for a better version, but for now they are just perfect.

But this answer enclosed another question: Supposed that Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the iPhone, what would have been the alternative, or would have been a one at all? Would Nokia ‘The №1 telecom company back then’ come up with the equivalent of iPhone and we would still be using Symbian OS instead of iOS till this day?

Part two No, everything we see around us in part of orchestrated show and we meant to have an iPhone, Facebook, Instagram or even Pornhub, so this bring the hypothesis of Nick Bostrom that our entire own reality is just a simulation by an observer and we are just kind of a fuel for what to come next, as Elon Musk put it best:

‘ Humanity Is a Kind of ‘Biological Boot Loader’ for AI’

So basically Mr. Musk is saying we are here for a while and eventually we will disappear and be gone just like the dinosaurs.

Make no mistake, these incredible sophisticated technologies are not a one-hit wonder or discovered by mere luck under a rock but the outcome of tons and tons of painstaking studies and research.

Whether you are an evolutionist or creationist, no one can deny how and where the trajectory of our civilization is heading. So yeah, this begs the question: Why aren’t many new inventions?

If Facebook sent Myspace.com to the Wayback Machine and Instagram video killed Vine, why aren’t there many new inventions taking over the old stuff?

And here is the problem.

The amount of knowledge and technology we obtained throughout the course of our civilization is immense and as Yuval Harari said ‘Irreversible’. Technology has opened to us an entire ocean of information where everybody, and I mean ‘Everybody’, is on a very close up sight of pretty much everything.

We are currently going through a freighting stagnation phase and that applies to every industry as Gordon Moore predicted in the 60s. With more information comes more innovation and as we try to close every gap and loophole in our civilization, the need to come up with even more powerful ideas is imminent and is not an option. Markets are  congested with staggering amount of look-alike products, irrelevant services that are hardly distinguished, and average is becoming the new black.

Take a closer look at Apple. The tech giant in its all glory has been struggling since the demise of Steve Jobs to come up with one single original product, even with the tremendous power and the access to all that heap of cash and resources has yet sorta failed to come up something close to original since the launch of iPhone in 2007.

The iPad?

Well that’s just a big iPhone and so is the Apple watch, a miniature iPhone. So yeah, every new iPhone is a hair better than its predecessor.

The struggle is real.

Coming up with something new requires extensive amount of hard work and ahead of time mindset. We simply can not invent the future with the tools of today. It requires a catalyst of design, strategy, technology, and intuition working together with tons of hard work. It needs a laser focus vision that look over the time of not today, not tomorrow but for a 100 years from now.

There is no room for mediocrity, irrelevant verbose, or half baked ideas
No more room for indecisiveness or hesitation
No more room for the ‘Good enough’

That’s where we are all heading.

We are all stuck in a giant ball and it is getting crowded, hard to squeeze in and moving forward, and the only way out is to leave that ball.

So, are you in or out?

Photo by Uriel Soberanes