The Next Big Thing

I am listening to David Kirkpatrick’s excellent closing panel at the RVC SoftEdge Conference here in NYC.

Guy Chiarello, who is the CTO of Morgan Stanley just said, “I have stopped worrying about the next big thing, I just worry about my big problems, which are security, open source, business continuity, systems management tools, etc”.

This is soo true. The reason why the Internet was so big was that it changed the whole paradigm of the technology business. Now we are in an evolutionary paradigm, not a revolutionary paradigm. We’ve built an open, connected, computing platform that scales and evolves bit by bit, piece by piece. And as such, there won’t be a next big thing in tech for a long time.

But we’ve still got big problems, some of them created by the architecture of the net, some of them created by the the hyper competitve global economy we are in, and some of them created by the increasingly tense world we live in.

So get used to it. Stop looking for the next big thing and start solving problems. That’s the new way to make money in tech.