Tech Trends Shift From Simple Apps to Complex Real-World Solutions
As the easy innovations of the mobile and cloud eras reach saturation, the technology industry turns its focus toward solving humanity's most difficult challenges. This new decade demands collaborative, multi-faceted approaches to areas like climate change, wellness, and data society.
The technology industry experiences a major shift as the easy innovations of the previous decade reach their limits. The 2010s focus heavily on executing the basic dreams of mobile, cloud, and data infrastructure, creating an expansive greenfield of opportunities. Now, that once-fertile ground sits largely fallow because simple solutions like messaging apps and basic analytics packages already exist in abundance.
This new decade requires technologists and startups to tackle much harder questions about how to improve society and build a sustainable planet. These complex challenges lack simple point solutions, meaning that progress demands intense collaboration, multiple new inventions, and significant legal and cultural changes. For founders tired of building repetitive software-as-a-service products, this pivot to meaningful problem-solving promises an exciting era.
Key areas driving this transformation include wellness, climate, creativity, fundamentals, and what experts call the data society. Despite the ubiquity of information, professionals still struggle with basic data calculations, highlighting the urgent need for a revolution in data tools. Future platforms must actively augment human thinking, identify gaps in logic, and highlight missing data to help people make fully-formed, unbiased decisions.