[Lyric] Stop Pouting About Techs Next Big Thing Its Here (Farhad Manjoo)

It's easy to get jaded when you cover the technology industry. Silicon Valley's giants are constantly belching wisps of marshmallow-thick hype, and any reporter looking to cover the beat has to be constantly on guard against unproven claims about this or that algorithmically-abetted amazing advance.


And another thing: We're witnessing the dawn of a new paradigm in machine-human cooperation.

So when Christopher Mims of Quartz recently declared 2013 to be a "lost year for tech"—one in which, he says, the industry produced nothing of great value—I could see where he was coming from. I feel the same way some days; when I'm covering some new me-too social-media product or a great new way to target ads, I hang my head in despair.

But then I read a couple of rebuttals to Mims by Daring Fireball's John Gruber and Om Malik, of Gigaom. They argued that the industry's biggest advances have occurred beneath the media's radar, and that the industry, as a whole, is anything but stagnant.

I side with these more positive takes. Here's my roundup of reasons to break out of your tech funk and be optimistic about tech in 2014.

First, stop clamoring for the "next big thing." Were you disappointed, once again, that Apple AAPL +0.40% didn't release something amazing and new this year—a TV or a smartwatch, say? Were you bummed that there were few revolutionary features on the latest smartphones? Have you concluded that the tech business is boring, that there isn't any more innovation, that we live in uninteresting times?

I, too, constantly yearn for mind-blowing new tech. But I've been getting tired of the claim that just because we haven't seen something on the order of the smartphone or tablet in the last few years, the tech industry can no longer innovate. The problem with this argument is that the touchscreen smartphone (and its cousin the tablet) was a singularly novel, industry-shattering device, and we're unlikely to see anything as groundbreaking in a generation.

The smartphone and the tablet are the next big things, and we act like spoiled children when we claim that they somehow aren't enough. Most future advances will simply be improvements or expansions on these basic technologies—ways to make smartphones and tablets cheaper, more powerful, smaller, lighter, and to let them control and connect with an ever-larger slice of our lives.

In 2013 we saw several such innovations. Google's GOOG +0.40% Motorola MSI -0.29% subsidiary released a really good phone, the Moto G, that sells for $199 without a contract—the first of several devices that will radically expand access to mobile phones. Meanwhile Apple's top-of-the-line devices came with an incredible processor, the A7, which proved that mobile devices can approach the power of desktop-class PCs. I was blown away, too, by the growth of apps that are now rewiring our worlds—apps such as ride-sharing service Uber or the robotic slot-car racer Anki Drive, which show the potential for our phones to transform the physical world.

As the analyst Benedict Evans has argued, the true revolution in mobile computing is one of scale; we're going from an Internet controlled by PCs to one controlled by three billion to five billion phones. No device on the horizon—not the long-awaited TV made by Apple, not Google Glass, not a smartwatch—will be as exciting as what smartphones and tablets hold in store for us. So let's stop yearning for new stuff just for novelty's sake. The next big thing is already here, it's in your pocket, and it's incredible.
Second, privacy is no longer an afterthought. I've already argued that the disappearing-message app Snapchat was the most interesting technology of 2013 because it paved the way for services that don't save all our data by default. The larger message of Snapchat, though, is that privacy isn't dead.

For years, tech giants have given lip service to privacy. "It's very important to us!" they insist while slurping up mountains of your data. But the industry hasn't spent much time looking at privacy as a place for innovation, as a feature that users will care about when they choose apps or services.

Thanks to Snapchat, revelations about the National Security Agency, and an increased fear of living in a panopticon, that will thankfully begin to change in 2014. Watch for an avalanche of apps that take privacy seriously—whether they delete data by default, keep your data local, or limit the scope of their sharing.

Third, enterprise tech is interesting, finally. For years, business software was a dead-end for innovation, dominated as it was by Microsoft, MSFT -1.77% Oracle, ORCL -0.32% and other entrenched incumbents. Now that's changing. In 2013 several alternatives rose to challenge old-school business tech—like Quip, a clever new word-processing app, or Box's collaboration software, Box Notes—and I suspect this trend will continue this year.

One enterprise advance I'm looking forward to: The rise of companies looking to bring cloud-based services to specific, specialized markets—also known as "vertical software-as-a-service" businesses. I'm talking about firms like Veeva Systems, VEEV -0.85% which makes a cloud-based sales tool for the health care industry, and which successfully went public in the fall. Watch for other startups aimed at specific industries—law firms, hospitality, health care—to get really big, without anyone noticing, in 2014.

Last but not least, robots aren't necessarily coming for your job. It's been a cliché in the Valley for years that machines will replace humans across a wide variety of job types. But while artificial intelligence is still advancing at a furious pace, I was thrilled that AI is augmenting, rather than superseding, humans. Look how Redfin used tech to create better real-estate agents rather than replace them, or how the app Duolingocrowdsources human intelligence to produce better translations than machines are capable of.

I think we're witnessing the dawn of a new paradigm in machine-human cooperation: Combining machine intelligence with biological intelligence will always trump one or the other. Machines make us better, and we make machines better. There's still hope for us. Welcome to the bionic future.

Do you have any to add? I'd love to hear from you about the best and worst tech trends of the year.