Whenever the subject of virtual or augmented reality comes up and I see hot takes written by tech writers I just want to bang my head against the wall. They NEVER take into account how consumers react from a retail or business perspective.
What do I mean by that? It’s that consumer choice is greatly influenced by the gravitational effects of price and convenience. As a financial analyst advising Fortune 500 level companies I have decades of experience in seeing the worst products outsell the best. The Chevy Malibu outsells the Corvette. The MacBook Air outsells the MaBook Pro, or McDonalds sells more hamburgers than Five Guys.
And yet, when tech writers talk about virtual reality, they say things like “actually visiting the Louvre is so much better of an experience than wearing a heavy headset”. Well, yeah! If everyone can set aside time and $5,000 for a weekend trip to the Louvre it’s of course going to beat a virtual visit with a headset. But consumers don’t make decisions without taking into account the cost.
And as my long time readers know, I’ve been beating the drum that it is technology which brings the world to people that is changing how society works. Connecting people in new ways and transmitting information is going to kill industries and create new ones.
This is starkly opposed to the Industrial Revolution where technology was all about bringing you to the world. We stopped using horses and invented the automobile, airplanes, and space craft. That was good and it had to happen. But transporting people and packages is now a solved problem. Humanity is now advancing to the next phase of bringing the world to you.
This is part of the reason why I’ve always been down about Elon Musk and his business endeavors. It was all old news. Transporting people via cars, tunnels, and even space craft. That is ho hum. Now that he owns Twitter, that is now his only business of any real importance to the future. Because Twitter is about transmitting information and connecting people.
Augmented and virtual reality clears my hurdle for being of enormous importance to the future. When looking at a new technology I ask myself “does it alter the master logistics equation of doing business?”.
An example of technology which tech writers are all worked up into a lather about but which I’m not impressed is self driving vehicles. Self driving cars and trucks don’t really change the equation as much as you might think because even though driver costs go down, they are offset by higher initial equipment acquisition costs and monthly depreciation.
But AR and VR have the potential to make a huge impact. It is much cheaper to buy these headsets than to spend thousands of dollars on travel or spends millions of dollars on bricks and mortar office buildings in the city. It is staggering to think about how our world could change in the future. This is why Apple’s Tim Cook has been telling everybody who’ll listen that our world is going to change drastically by AR/VR and we’d better get ready for it.
I watched a YouTube video by Marques Brownlee earlier today which brought this issue to front of mind. He was impressed by the tech and genuinely believes that it is going to be a real thing in the near future. He’s a little less sanguine about the role which Facebook might play.
Why are Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg so adamant that AR and VR are coming? Because like myself, they understand how business moves by the all important master logistics equation. And rarely does a new technology come along that can alter it by so much.
And yet, when tech writers talk about virtual reality, they say things like “actually visiting the Louvre is so much better of an experience than wearing a heavy headset”. Well, yeah! If everyone can set aside time and $5,000 for a weekend trip to the Louvre it’s of course going to beat a virtual visit with a headset. But consumers don’t make decisions without taking into account the cost.
And as my long time readers know, I’ve been beating the drum that it is technology which brings the world to people that is changing how society works. Connecting people in new ways and transmitting information is going to kill industries and create new ones.
This is starkly opposed to the Industrial Revolution where technology was all about bringing you to the world. We stopped using horses and invented the automobile, airplanes, and space craft. That was good and it had to happen. But transporting people and packages is now a solved problem. Humanity is now advancing to the next phase of bringing the world to you.
This is part of the reason why I’ve always been down about Elon Musk and his business endeavors. It was all old news. Transporting people via cars, tunnels, and even space craft. That is ho hum. Now that he owns Twitter, that is now his only business of any real importance to the future. Because Twitter is about transmitting information and connecting people.
Augmented and virtual reality clears my hurdle for being of enormous importance to the future. When looking at a new technology I ask myself “does it alter the master logistics equation of doing business?”.
An example of technology which tech writers are all worked up into a lather about but which I’m not impressed is self driving vehicles. Self driving cars and trucks don’t really change the equation as much as you might think because even though driver costs go down, they are offset by higher initial equipment acquisition costs and monthly depreciation.
But AR and VR have the potential to make a huge impact. It is much cheaper to buy these headsets than to spend thousands of dollars on travel or spends millions of dollars on bricks and mortar office buildings in the city. It is staggering to think about how our world could change in the future. This is why Apple’s Tim Cook has been telling everybody who’ll listen that our world is going to change drastically by AR/VR and we’d better get ready for it.
I watched a YouTube video by Marques Brownlee earlier today which brought this issue to front of mind. He was impressed by the tech and genuinely believes that it is going to be a real thing in the near future. He’s a little less sanguine about the role which Facebook might play.
Why are Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg so adamant that AR and VR are coming? Because like myself, they understand how business moves by the all important master logistics equation. And rarely does a new technology come along that can alter it by so much.
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