during my recent valley stopover the undoubtedly most asked question was about the estimation of the next big thing. people nagging about incremental-innovation-only, no stones being left unturned and (again) missing business models - in fact a reasonable time for a three-year big sleep. a few boilerplate reasons i could bring into mind:
- the real opportunities and eyeballs move from the web to the internet (ubiquitous space, platforms and devices)
- that being said, too much focus is still on web-sites alone, which in fact lose much of their mojo to superior authorities et al
- low entry barriers make it easy to chew through every obvious idea in a gazillion of variations rather than to look sideways
- the gatekeepers aka ole' boys club remain the same and in turn become more risk averse (what got you here won't get you there)
- most companies are seeking parity (feature matrix) with the competition instead of sustainable difference
- dead on arrival: the much cited attention crash is near + services neglecting to figure out a pleasure model right from the start
in general i agree that it's been a while since we saw the last big spark but on the flip side i still advocate that it's more reasonable for startups to build on a tangible context because it's just a lot easier to label something as new than to create something that's actually desirable.