Lucky thirteen.
News cycles being what they are, especially in September when ocean-borne Armageddon unleashes serialized hell-on-earth disorder in alphabetical order, the moment came and went.
24-year old Amazon became a trillion-dollar company, just four weeks after 42-year old Apple had become history’s first corporation with a dollar valuation thirteen digits long.
And, yes, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are taking their share of lumps these days on Capitol Hill, but one can’t help but get the the sense that “the Four,” as author and tech consultant Scott Galloway refers to them, are still only in their early stages of redefining what it means to be a household word.
Last week, Apple–as part of its annual iPhone upgrade cavalcade–introduced a brand new level of self-health monitoring to the wearables category with its Apple Watch Series 4.
A week earlier, Google and KB Home announced a bundle of customer service-backed integrated smart home capabilities that together will add maybe $600 or so to the price of a new home.
And yesterday, turning up the dial on its own foray into homes as it is on every other business front line, Amazon unveiled a raft of 15 new home entertainment, appliance, and security devices all of which–thanks to the wonders of genie of the moment, Alexa–make our wishes their command.
As author Galloway observes in “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google:”
The Four are engaged in an epic race to become the operating system for our lives.”
Galloway’s fascinating exploration of the drivers of each of their success leads him to a light-bulb moment. Each of them–emblematic of “search,” “social,” “brand,” and “retail”–taps into human brain chemistry’s most primal instincts to win at hunting and gathering.
Steve Jobs likened a computer to “a bicycle for the mind,” and in a way, the totality of technologies under the umbrella of Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple have become–if you’ll excuse the notion, a Tesla Model S for the mind.
At the end of the day, our minds do what our 250,000-year-old brains want to do–which add up to a theme and variations on hunting and gathering.
The reason we’d say that Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon–despite its impressive escalation of Alexa’s bag of domestic tricks–are just getting going is this. Home technology, in the truest sense of the word, will one day be less about whiz-bang conveniences along the lines of domestic “special effects.”
Home technology, very very soon, will be more about how homes–as a complex of structure and systems–come to be, what they’re made of, how they work from the inside out in terms of materials’ and products’ ability to leverage frameware to update, repair, and morph over time, and how they connect to their residents’ brains, as hunters and gatherers.
What happens to residential construction’s supply chain when 3-D printing, with self-repairing, resilient, circularly-usable, digitally configurable atomic data can make a house, tie it to a social community of connections, emit positive impacts on the earth, and keep its inhabitants healthy, safe, and prosperous?
One starts to imagine a vastly different chain of materials, events, and capital weaving together in double- and triple-helices, propelled forward into value generation over time and space–all drawing from our most human, most basic of instincts, the need to successfully hunt and gather. All will add up to tying our brains to the brain and central nervous system to a single operating system that is our home and community.
Apple, Google, and Amazon will, in one way or another, totally alter the supply-, value-, design-, engineering-, investment-, and construction-chains that lead to what we call homes, in both structure and systems. They’re already at it.
That’s why, for Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, there’s no place like home. That’s why our lens, and our passion, and our purpose at Hanley Wood is so fanatically focused on taking innovation out of the realm of theory and abstraction, and putting it into action. There really is no place like home.
