What's in store in 2021?

I love making predictions. No, not the astrological kind but the tech landscape kind. It's fun to crystal-gaze and think of the future. To be fair, predicting is difficult but identifying emerging trends and scenarios is plausible. And these are just that- plausible scenarios for 2021.

I had noted a few trends based on the Coronavirus and its impact in the very early days of the virus (March 14, 2020) before the lockdown, and surprisingly most of the scenarios came to life. You can read it here. Some of those covid trends surge ahead in 2021, irrespective of the vaccine. We’ve gone too far ahead to go back to the old ways of life.

Here are some more trends that I believe will rule 2021-

Foldable phones go mainstream by end of 2021

I was personally thrilled when I first heard of foldable screen tech and even more excited when we got to see prototypes of these handsets way back in late 2019. However, my hopes were dashed when Samsung released their first foldable phone and it became a train-wreck. Creases on screen?! Yuck!

What I didn’t expect is that handset manufacturers would iron out the creases (pun intended) so early and we would get a slew of great foldable devices (Samsung Z Fold 2, Moto Razr, Z Flip etc) so soon. The possibilities with the foldables are too amazing to ignore- large screens are great for creation and content consumption. Smaller screens are great for daily casual tasks.

What holds foldable phones back is the pricing though. With these handsets pushing towards the 1500 $ range, they seem unaffordable but as production scales and adoption increases, prices should normalise.

The big push to adoption of foldable will however be the entry of Apple. Once Apple releases a foldable phone sometime in 2022-23, the genie is out of the bottle.

Frankly, I’m bored with the candybar generic phones and look forward to some outrageous phone designs in 2021. 

Tech gets de-globalised

With the political posturing by world leaders over Covid and scapegoating China, I see tech going regional instead of global, unfortunately. This will be further exaggerated and pushed ahead by local business lobbies (under the guise of nationalism) who have a lot to gain with the de-globalisation of tech.

Early trends are here- EU has a digital services act, India has an active ban on all Chinese apps, Russia making it mandatory for all handset manufacturers to pre-load Russia-made apps/software.

This does not bode well for the major global FAANG giants which are further exacerbated by the next trend.

Big Tech gets regulated

Governments across the world are suddenly aware of the systemic risks to small/local businesses and algorithm-based amoral information dissemination leading to national security risks led by big tech companies.

The EU has always been at the forefront of legislation against the big tech cos but surprisingly the US too has gone all-in on anti-trust investigations. On the ground, we also saw apps like Spotify and Fortnite taking a stand against the Apple Appstore revenue-sharing practices.

Expect more action here and a big ruling from the US ala Microsoft in the 90s.

Mom and Pop stores go online with Whatsapp

Whatsapp is the default messaging P2P app in most nations and with over 175 million people using the service to message a WhatsApp Business account each day as of late October, it also dominated People to business messaging too. Businesses manage their WhatsApp presence via the WhatsApp Business app, which had over 50 million users worldwide as of July this year.

So building shopping as a feature into Whatsapp was a no-brainer. Whatsapp now offers hosting services for businesses to manage their WhatsApp messages and is expanding ways for customers to make purchases right from a chat. It recently also piloted Catalogue in a few countries and introduced P2P payments in India. Whatsapp already serves as an unorganised shopping/order-taking medium for small mom and pop stores in India and they have just organised it. The second-order effect is that shopping also helps to push its P2P payment feature offering.

Whatsapp may not dominate the shopping/food delivery space since eCommerce/delivery is more than aggregating demand- it involves logistics, customer care support, delivery, etc but is a great start for Whatsapp and helps small businesses go online. Watch this space.

Sidenote- Instagram could do the same for fast fashion and experiential purchases. Facebook, FTW.

 Apple gets (even more) serious about content

With the economic slowdown coupled with handsets that last much longer, the replacement cycle for handsets has stretched from an average of 2 years to 3. This does not bode well for Apple who spend all their energy trying to get users to upgrade.

The masterstroke of Apple was to forecast this (by design or accident) and create a walled-garden of Apple services that now contributes 10 billion $ every quarter- that's more per quarter than the Mac ($7.4 billion last quarter), iPad ($6.7 billion), or the collected “Wearables, Home, and Accessories” group of products ($7.3 billion).

Expect this pie to get larger and a credible source of revenue for Apple leading to larger investments on the content side in Music, TV+, Arcade.

HBO Max maxes out

The pandemic may have killed Quibi but HBO Max rode the covid wave like a beast.

The AT&T owned HBO with their legacy understanding of traditional pay-tv with HBO cable, theatrical business with Warner Bros and telecom is set for a bumper year.

When Warner announced the release of their biggest tentpole movies for 2021 on HBO Max, old-guards were shocked and felt that it cheapened their art-form.

AT&T may not mind so much if it speeds the demise of the century-old moviegoing habit.

For AT&T, HBO Max isn’t just a convenient way to get films and television shows to the public. Instead, the platform is a key part of its wireless business. HBO Max is included in packages for some high-end phone and internet subscribers, and it exists, in part, to create consumer loyalty to AT&T. For AT&T, HBO Max isn’t just a way to make money, but serves as an incentive to keep phone customers from defecting to its rivals. 

Like Prime Video helps sell more shoes on Amazon, when you have nothing to lose (financially) by bringing the biggest movies on to streaming, losing the streaming wars will take a lot of bad luck. I had written about this phenomenon of using content as a vehicle for engagement for the main business, a year ago, here.

 Entrepreneurship boom in small towns of India

With WFH now the norm for the top tier organisations in India post-covid, many professionals will continue/move to their small town/tier 2 city origins. To service and meet the aspirations and lifestyle-needs of these big city to small town diaspora, many businesses and micro-entrepreneurs will setup shop leading to an expanse in economic activity in these neglected towns

Covid has done what governments couldn’t.

On the fringes- AR gets more useful

As we spend more time in virtual spaces than in the real world, there is a lot of energy being spent on improving and monetising those virtual lands. There’s also a demographic shift coming. Gen Z’ers who spend all their free time on virtual metaverses like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite etc will soon become the dominant consuming generation edging out aging millennials. These Gen Z’ers are more adept at AR experiences and will also expect AR/VR experiences as “hygiene” features.

There are some interesting AR patents being listed that I track regularly. Here are a few-

Google is looking at understanding a person’s physical environment and placing relevant virtual objects in a mixed reality view through smartphones or headsets. The virtual object suggestions could be based on a user’s brand interest, and interacting with a virtual object could enable further interactions such as the ability to purchase an item thus bringing Google Ads to AR. You can read more about the patent here

As I had noted earlier, there’s a ton of money to be made in virtual goods. Snapchat wants some of that cash and its latest patent filing shows its seriousness. Snapchat allows users to create animated avatars of themselves called Bitmojis. And they know that just as you would dress up your physical body, you would dress up your virtual body too. So Snapchat has created a feature where users can customise the clothing of their virtual avatars based on real items of clothing being sold on a retailer’s website. You can see a demo below-

There’s a lot more happening in the AR/VR space and will probably have another post dedicated to it soon. Killer AR/VR apps are a while away from mass adoption but the space is worth tracking.

So those are my quick trendhunting/scenario mapping/predictions for 2021. I’m sure there may be many more that I am missing (unaware or incompetent to comprehend in the fields of bitcoin, edtech, health-tech, etc) that you can add in the comments.

Have a great inventive 2021! It's going to be radical.

I write to exercise my brain cells. You can read my previous posts here or at hiteshshetty.medium.com.