Everybody promised to disrupt the smartphone — and the smartphone outlasted them all

Everywhere you turned over the last few years, someone was promising The Next Big Thing After Smartphones. Yes, they’d say, the iPhone is the most ubiquitous product in the history of consumer electronics and the smartphone reprogrammed the world in utterly unparalleled ways. But have you seen this voice assistant that makes Morgan Freeman give you driving directions, or these humongous goggles that let you play ping-pong with someone across the globe? This is the future.

We’re in a moment of retrenchment in the tech industry, as companies of all types grapple with a tough economy and the fact that the pandemic wasn’t so much an accelerant of future trends as it was, well, a global pandemic that forced everyone to change their lives drastically and practically overnight. Most people are back in offices, most kids are back in school, and instead of living in 2039, we’re largely back to 2019.

That has meant that the future, at least the one the upstarts promised, has taken a beating the last few months. Meta laid off 11,000 people across the company, including at Reality Labs, the team responsible for building Quest products and making the metaverse happen. Meanwhile, the Quest Pro, which was supposed to be an enticing glimpse at the augmented and virtual reality future, is mostly a disaster. 

Elsewhere, Amazon cut a reported 10,000 jobs of its own, with the Alexa team reportedly among the most affected. Snap laid off about 20 percent of its staff, including on the Spectacles team, and canceled its handheld drone. Apple’s long-rumored AR glasses are rumored to be years away, and CEO Tim Cook has said the company needs to be “very deliberate” in its hiring going forward. The status of Microsoft’s HoloLens appears very much in doubt, with the company deciding to be a Quest software supplier instead. 

With stock prices down across the tech industry and an uncertain future for the overall economy, there’s little budget or freedom to build things that aren’t working — and none of these companies’ big, futuristic bets are currently working. After a decade of growth (and two recent years of mega-growth), the free money is suddenly gone, and all that’s left is a lot of big ideas without a business plan or enough users. 

Amazon’s failure is maybe the most instructive here. After trying and failing to get into the phone market with the Fire Phone, the company spent the better part of a decade pouring R&D muscle and marketing budgets into making Alexa happen. Dave Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, recently told the Financial Times that “I’ll take five Fire Phone failures, if I can get one Alexa.”

Executives around the company will gladly regale you with stories about all the things the voice assistant can do for you, and tell you of the millions of people happily chatting away with their own Alexa devices. And yet according to reporting from Insider and others, the company has struggled to find a business model for the device, and to get users to do more than play music and set timers.

Amazon’s big idea about Alexa wasn’t wrong, exactly. In fact, most of the tech industry shares the ambient computing vision: a seamless network of gadgets that know you and can act on your behalf to accomplish all kinds of goals. And there are lots of Alexa devices out there in people’s homes, playing music and setting timers. But nobody’s figured out how to make ambient computing profitable.

Do you have speakers shout mattress ads unprompted into people’s living rooms? That’s a bad user experience. Do you let businesses pay to be the one whose toilet paper people buy when they ask Alexa to buy toilet paper? That makes users not trust the system. The teams behind Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri have all struggled to help you figure out what you can do with their assistants, and to make it easy for you to have successful interactions. They’re competing with the big screen in your pocket, too, which you already know how to use.

The companies working on AR, VR, and the metaverse are having an even harder time, as they try to invent a whole new technology stack while simultaneously convincing the world that you totally want to spend all your waking and working hours inside of a headset. It seems likely that augmented reality will catch on eventually, at least for things like getting directions and accessing information about the real world. But the tech to make that great is still a ways off, and it’s not at all clear that VR is ever going to be a mainstream activity outside of some fun video games.

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