Howard Lindzon has been asking people to think about The Next Ten Years. He says:
Few of us are thinking of the next TEN years. It’s hard not to get excited and short term distracted with Twitter, Groupon and Facebook adding billions in value as private companies in just a few years.
Thinking about the future is what VCs and entrepreneurs must be doing. Focusing on what is working now is not the way to join that billion dollar club in the future.
Last week I wrote a post about mobile OS market share and where developers should be focusing. It generated a great discussion in the comments and led to a number of posts in the blogs and traditional media. Many of those who disagreed with my conclusions focused on what is working in iOS today. And my counter to them is what is going on today will not be going on a year from now and certainly not five years from now.
If there is any certainty in the tech business, it is things are going to change. What we should all be doing is thinking about how those changes will develop, what forces are at work, and what new directions things will head in.
This blog is a big part of how I do that kind of thinking. And I am not the only VC who is thinking out loud. Mark Suster wrote a great post this past week where he lays out his vision of how the cloud stack is getting built out. Maybe Mark is right and maybe he is wrong. Maybe I am right about Android and iOS and maybe I am wrong.
The most important thing is that we are all thinking about where things are going and making bets about the future. Because betting that things will stay the same is a bad bet. I am sure of that.
