‘ Next big things’
don’t just appear
from nowhere
FROM THE
EDITOR
ILLUSTRATION:^ RAY^ORANGESBSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2018 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2018 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2017 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer
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Entire Magazine 2011 • D& AD Award: Covers 2010 • Maggies Technology Cover 2010 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2010 • BSME Launch of the Year 2009Greg Williams
EditorYou may not have heard of Bill Gross,
but you have been productised by him.
The software entrepreneur is respon-
sible for one of the most significant
economic models of the internet era.
In 1996, Gross founded GoTo.com, a
search engine with the tagline “search
made simple”. Search engines of the
time, like Alta Vista, were strewn with
features such as email and weather
updates that made even finding a
search bar challenging. Besides the
cleaner interface, GoTo distinguished
itself in another important way – all its
search results would be sponsored.
Gross’s idea seems obvious today
but, at the time, enabling commercial
entities to buy keywords and elevating
content according to the highest bidder
was entirely new. Display adver-
tising wasn’t an original idea –
but advertisers competing for
eyeballs in real-time was.
GoTo rebranded as Overture
in 2001 to focus on being a third-
party service provider to other
search engines. In 2003, it was
bought by Yahoo!, as much of its
revenue was generated by GoTo.
Today, Gross’s vision can be
seen in Google Ads (rebranded
from AdWords in July 2018), the
western internet’s dominant
commercial model, with
revenues in 2017 of $95 billion.
Of course, Google’s originalmission wasn’t to create one of the
world’s most profitable businesses;
it was to organise all the world’s infor-
mation, initially via a search engine
that had no commercial underpin-
nings – AdWords wasn’t introduced
until October 2000, two years after the
company was founded. Its pre-emi-
nence has been built on its function-
ality, its uncluttered UI and delivery of
results with a high degree of relevance.
Such is the way with innovation; much
like geologists examining strata in rock
formations, it’s possible to examine the
underpinnings of dominant players in
every category. The iPhone is often
cited as a technology that made the
rest of the marketplace obsolete. But
the iPhone was the culmination ofinnovation in batteries, LCDs, Wi-Fi and
the internet that has origins in the work
of physicists and chemists in previous
centuries. The impact brought about by
mobile technology can be traced back
to pioneers whose names are forgotten.
As I write, the annual jamboree of
technology, the Consumer Electronics
Show, is taking place in Las Vegas. As
every year, the consensus from those
attending is that there’s little new to
get excited about. This seems to miss
the point: events like CES conceal the
slow, hard-to predict, drawn-out nature
of innovation and discovery. Trade
events bear little relation to meaningful
change, rather they are showbusiness –
a marketing platform for organisations
that have the relentless drumbeat of
quarterly earnings reports to adhere to.
The use-case is all. Many of the
emerging technologies of today are
seen as disappointing or “not where
we need them to be”. VR? Consumer
adoption of the technology has been
minimal. Why? Not enough products
that excite people are being built
because the technology is complex
and few developers have the skills to
build products. Machine learning? We’re
a long way off it being used for much
more than pattern recognition. Block-
chain? There are few clear use cases.
This is disappointment based on an
absence of product-fit. However, these
technologies will continue to develop
incrementally, maybe becoming what
we think they might become – or maybe
something else entirely – because of
the bench work and research being
done in universities, laboratories and
companies across the world. The notion
of the maverick individual is one that
the tech world likes to mythologise,
but the truth is that every “next big
thing” is created on the shoulders of
others. Inter-generational, private,
public progress is the partnership
that will ensure our continued advance.