The Most Hated Buzzwords in Tech

some of the technobabble in scripts for that show. My go to Star Trek tech Nonsense always includes the phrase reverse the polarity, which typically doesn't mean very much in most of the dialogue where it pops up, but it sounds, you know, science adjacent. So I suppose, you know, we should give writers some slack. They're trying to write stories that are set in a far off future about technology that really we can only dream about today. I still

want a replicator, though. Just look at how far the tech world has come, however, since the original Star Trek series first broadcast back in nineteen sixty. But you don't have to go to the future to encounter plenty of jargon and buzzwords. They're all over the place, particularly in the tech sector, really throughout the business sector in general,

but tech in particular is incredibly guilty of this. It's one of the hallmarks of tech, and you get extra points if whatever term you're using is so vague or easy to misuse that it may as well be meaningless. So today we're going to talk about some tech buzzwords that have made various lists for most hated buzzwords in Tech,

or most hated jargon in Tech, or something along those lines. Now, I pulled these terms from a lot of different sources, all from articles that were about hated or misused tech buzzwords. Some of the buzzwords are used well beyond tech itself. Some of them don't even originate from tech, but just get reused. And I use sites like The American Genius and Smart Company and CMC Global and DNS Research, Vation and Forbes and trust Radius and net Suite to gather

all of these different terms. And the terms span the last several years. Some of these buzzwords have faded a little bit from use. We're going to talk about some that, you know, just a couple of years ago were dominating

the conversations in tech, and now they're almost forgotten. Now I'm going to start with one that I personally find exhausting, and I bet a lot of y'all out there feel much the same way, and that term is, of course the biggest buzzword of the last couple of years in tech Artificial intelligence, or more frequently, just plain old AI. The explosion in AI development over the last couple of years has really elevated the buzz terms use within the

tech space. And don't get me wrong, AI has been a thing in tech for decades, like more than half a century. It's a common theme in science fiction stories, whether we're talking about comedic droi sidecakes, or you know, some omnim present malicious intelligence determined to wipe out humans. But in the last couple of years, AI has really ramped up in the public consciousness, largely thanks to a

specific branch of the discipline, that of generative AI. Now I don't think anyone out there is unfamiliar with generative AI at this point, but just in case this term is new to you, Generative AI creates stuff. It generates

based upon user input. So you might ask a question and then it gives you an answer, or you might create a suggestion that it makes some sort of content like I once tried to use generative AI to make I think it was a Shakespearean sonnet about artificial intelligence, and it did a decent job at making a very clever poem about AI, but it didn't follow the Shakespearean sonnet rules, and I'm a stickler for form. Anyway, you could even have generative AI that can create images based

on techs. You're all familiar with this, I'm sure, and even today you can get to the point where you can create video clips with some of these forms of generative AI. And there's no doubt about it. Generative AI can be really impressive, at least when it's working properly. When it's not working properly, it can be creepy or unsettling.

Sometimes it could be like that if it's working properly too, don't get me wrong, but man, even as recently as just a couple of weeks ago, I was using an image generator out of curiosity, just trying to create images of characters from a friend of mine's podcast. She made this podcast, and I was just like, I wonder if

I could create some like character concept images. And I'm not an artist, and I just did this out of curiosity, having no desire to actually use the images, but I was wondering if I could make it happen, and still fingers are hard for AI, y'all. There were so many love crafty and monstrosities created by this image generator, and it made me really feel calm that if I were to actually help my friend create character images for some of her creations, I would actually work with an artist.

I would hire a human artist to work with, because then I know I would be one helping an actual artist get work, which I think is really important and to get what I wanted. But countless startups have launched since late twenty twenty two, when open ai really got the ball rolling by introducing chat GPT. Though to be clear, there were already some generative AI applications available before chat GPT. I would just say chat GPT launched everything into the stratosphere.

But here's my problem. Generative AI is just one implementation of artificial intelligence, and it's not the only kind. AI is actually an enormous discipline. It covers a huge amount of ground like computer vision and image recognition that falls under AI. Natural language processing is part of AI, and obviously it has to be part of generative AI too. If you're going to get anything that even resembles what you were asking for, a lot of robotics falls under

the category of AI. Not all of it, but a lot of it does. And on top of that, you know the fact that we have all these different kinds of AI and not just generative means that using the blanket term the umbrella term for one specific implementation is really not very accurate. But on top of that, some companies are using AI pretty liberally to cover stuff that's not even really artificial intelligence, like stuff like just algorithms.

And yes, algorithms are part of AI, they can be part of AI, but that doesn't mean an algorithm by itself should be described as AI. So if you've got an algorithm that is looking at what I'm browsing, you know, I'm looking at maybe vinyl record albums of the New York Dolls, and then it do you have a recommendation? Algorithm says, hey, maybe you should check out Velvet Underground. That's not exactly artificial intelligence, although it is an excellent suggestion.

But because AI is so buzzy, right, it's such a popular buzzword, there have been this ton of startups that have begun to use AI to describe their pitch to investors and to media. I can't tell you how many unsolicited emails I get every single day from PR firms representing clients who are trying to position their business as the next big thing in AI, and sometimes, in fact, I would argue frequently, they have little to no connection

to the actual discipline of artificial intelligence. On top of that, I am also frustrated that so many businesses seem anxious to jump into AI or else. I guess they're worried they'd be left behind, but it seems to me that many of these businesses have very little to no strategy that's actually connected to AI. It's almost as if the idea of AI is some sort of fix all solution to every problem. That is going to be probably the

coda for this podcast. The motto of this is that there are these buzzwords that people use, and it's almost like a shortcut or a get out of jail free card, where you've got this problem or challenge or goal in mind, but you have no idea how to achieve that goal, or overcome that challenge or solve that problem, So you just use this kind of blanket term to stand in place of an actual solution, and then you're just magically where you need to be, and we all know that's

not really how the world works. I wish it were. I would love to be able to use that kind of logic to fix all sorts of things in my life, but that's just not how it works. And you know, you can't just open a big old box that has the label AI on it and then business will magically perform better. It's kind of like how I am with electric guitars. So rather than practice on the electric guitar

I literally have standing right next to me. Sometimes I think, you know, I should really buy a new guitar, as if some how that new guitar is magically going to make me a better player. And I can tell you from experience that doesn't work either. And also my partner would likely kick me out of the house if I try and do that again. So I think the four

guitars I have are enough. Before we move on, we should lump in some other AI related terms in here, because AI, while that one alone is extremely buzzy and people misuse it or you know, misinterpret it all the time, there are others that fall into that same general category, like machine learning and deep learning. They do have meaning. These terms actually do mean something, so does AI for

that matter. They have meaning and they have relevance, but they are frequently overused or misused by various tech companies out there. And that's not good because you know, it can set unrealistic or incorrect expectations, and then when those expectations aren't met because the person had the incorrect interpretation of what the terms actually meant, then support for research and development in those kinds of fields can decline. And I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but it's happened

again and again and again. It happened with virtual reality. You know, we're seeing it possibly happen with mixed reality. If someone's working on a research project and then they find out that their funding has been cut because the people who are in charge of the purse strings had the wrong idea of what your work actually is all about. And then once they find out what it is about, they're like, oh, well, that's not what I wanted and they cut off funding. That stinks, right, That really did

happen with VR in the nineties. You had people who are working on important implementations of VR. I'm not talking just like games, which I mean, I think games are important, but beyond that, using VR for things like treating mental illness, and then all the money for research kind of dried up because people were disillusioned with what VR actually was compared to what they thought it was. This stuff happens, Okay, Next up, I want to talk about disrupt and disruption.

So these terms have been around for a while, and it's a dramatic word. Typically, it just means that someone has figured out a new way to do something. Sometimes it's not even a new way. Sometimes it's just a way that's a little bit different from how everyone else is doing it currently. But it might be a very old way that just fell out of favor and then

you kind of resurrect it. Now, the implication of disruption is that this new way of doing things is going to upend the industry it's in as a whole, and that it will threaten the security of companies that refuse to adjust to this new method and it will leave them in the dust if they're unable to adapt. And it's easier to understand if we just consider a couple of examples. Amazon, for instance, disrupted retail. But how did

it do it well? It did retail online starting with books and then eventually encompassing pretty much everything you can imagine. And I would argue that Amazon really isn't that much different from other huge retail companies in that many of the strategies employed by Amazon are similar to ones that were honed by companies like Walmart. It's just that Amazon cut out the brick and mortar stores for the most

part and employed some other technologies to personalize the experience. Plus, you know, buying stuff online means people don't have to interact with other human beings, and for a not insignificant slice of the population, that is a huge selling point. Oh I don't need to talk to a person, I'll just buy it online. Uber Lift and other ride haling companies disrupted the taxi industry, which obviously has been a real sticking point in various places around the world where

taxi companies have a great deal of influence. We've seen examples of local governments cracking down on these kinds of startups for sidestepping regulations that the taxi industry must obey, and there have been attempts to refer to these as ride shares, but because it's actually all about funneling money through to the parent organization like Uber or lyft or whatever.

It's not really ride sharing, it's ride haling, so it really is more like a taxi service than say, just connecting people who happen to want to get to the same place the same time. And there are a lot of other examples. Of course, Airbnb is disruptive to not only the hospitality industry but also real estate. I mean, it's hard for folks who are just starting out to go out and buy a house when the market caters to rich people who want to add to their portfolio

of rental properties. But not everything that's being called disruptive is actually upsetting apple carts. Sometimes the things that are being called disruptive are just a new kind of business. Sometimes it's describing a way of doing things that's different, but it's not necessarily advantageous compared to how the industry as a whole is doing whatever the thing is. And a lot of leaders really hate the term disruptive because it can distract folks into pursuing disruption at the expense

of actually making a business model that works. If you're banking on everything causing disruption in an established market and you're not actually spending effort making sure that your approach even makes sense. You're just trying to watch the world burn. Related to disrupt is the term game changer. That phrase implies that the business model forces a change on an

entire industry, it changes the game. That very rarely happens. Instead, we often hear game changer applied to businesses that are just new, even ones that aren't doing anything particularly that differently from their competitors or performing better than their competitors. Sometimes they're performing worse. That's hardly changing the game. Okay, we've got tons of other buzzwords to get through. Before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank

our sponsors. We're back. Time to talk about some more buzzwords that get a lot of hate on these lists. This next one is a huge one. It sometimes ranks is number one depending upon the year, and that is digital transformation that popped up on multiple most hated buzzwords and tech lists. John Moore of tech Target first this definition of digital transformation. He says, it is quote the incorporation of computer based technologies into an organization's products, processes,

and strategies. Organizations undertake digital transformation to better engage and serve their workforce and customers and thus improve their ability to compete end quote. So it's kind of like modernizing really, is what I would call it. You know, you're trying to figure out how can we take these various legacy systems and processes and bring them into the digital age, potentially making things easier to manage and monitor and measure

and all those sorts of things. Cindy Jondon of IFS, which is a cloud computing company, says, quote, it's really a seismic shift forcing organizations to better enable their teams and improve asset usage and customer experiences end quote. To me, that's teetering pretty darn close to being too vain to

be really useful. But at the same time, you could argue that each organization is going to have its own specific set of requirements and challenges, and so therefore it's impossible to get specific, right because if you get specific, then you're leaving out lots of other use cases, so you have to be really general. But yeah, that particular

description to me borders on not being very useful. Now, as pointed out on CMC Globals site, and issue with the concept of digital transformation is that there's a tendency to treat it again as a magical panacea similar to AI, right that by somehow just porting processes over into a computerized system, maybe even one that's networked, based on the cloud, whatever it may be, you have somehow transformed the business inherently, even though it's the exact same processes and everything, it's

just now it's done in a different way. Business strategy is still absolutely important, and without business strategy, shifting how you do things from one model to another doesn't actually address fundamental issues. Again, it's like you're slapping a band aid on something and you don't even understand it. It's like if someone had a cold and you put a band aid on their arm doesn't really address the problem. There's no denying that modernizing systems so that they're more

easily accessible and adaptable is really important. But as Mark Bilger of One Call puts it, quote digital transformations do not magically transform the business. A fool with a tool is still a fool, end quote. Kind of dig that. There are a lot of companies out there that do consulting work on digital transformation. I'm sure some of them are quite good at it, but in my experienced consultants are the absolute worst when it comes to leaning on

buzzwords in jargon to obfuscate what they mean. And I feel like I can say that with some authority because in my previous professional life, before I ever worked for iHeart, before I work for Discovery Communications, before I work for house stuffworks dot com, I spent more than seven years

working for management consultants. And I've read a lot of proposals and a lot of reports, y'all, And one thing I walked away with is that consultants just love to use language that ultimately doesn't mean very much but sounds good. Another big buzzword that makes these lists, and it's been around for quite some time at this point, is the cloud. Now, there's a meme that goes around that is one hundred percent accurate that says there is no cloud, It's just

somebody else's computer. That's true. That's the basic truth of what the cloud is. Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud development, whatever cloud service you're talking about. Ultimately, these all describe a situation in which the thing you are using is a computer system that's provided by a third party, and that's it. That's the magic of the cloud. So It may be that it's an operating environment. It may be that it's you know again, storage. It could be any

of those things. But really it just means that these these services are living on computers that are some else. Now, cloud solutions free up businesses so that they don't have to host their own services on premises or in tech speak, on prem. I cannot tell you how much I hate on prem not the concept but the actual use of that, as if on prem is somehow saving you a huge

amount of time as opposed to saying on premises. In my humble opinion, on prem is just a way to create a code language that in small ways excludes outsiders from your group. It's kind of akin to the Little Rascals having the he Man Woman Haters Club, though I really guess only a fraction of y'all probably know who

the little Rascals are. I'm old, but anyway, my commentary aside the issue many take with cloud terminology is that people will frequently use the phrase, similar to what we saw with AI and digital transformation, that it's some kind of cure all for any business challenge. There are definitely really good reasons to use cloud services, right like you might not be able to scale your services to your

customers if it became really popular. Right, if you host everything yourself and everything's running on servers that are in your own office space or garage, whatever it may be, and you suddenly get really popular, you could end up having your service completely overwhelmed and now you can't provide services to anybody. And this is also kind of a

good problem to have. It means that your services are resonating with customers, but you don't want the experience for them to be to log in and find out they can't access the thing that they're paying for. That's bad. So leaning on a large, established cloud provider could be the solution. It might be that, oh, well, we can scale just by purchasing more compute power or more storage

from this provider. But just poorting stuff from your own systems to the cloud doesn't automatically make them work better or reach more customers. It's not like the company providing the cloud services is going to be doing your marketing for you or anything, because they've already got their customer. Their customer is you. It's your job to go out

and get your own customers. But yeah, cloud computing is often used as sort of this hand wavy way of saying, don't worry about these problems, we got it covered, when in fact, the cloud does not magically solve stuff on its own. Again, this is a real issue with a lot of these buzzwords. If I'm being honest, it's really it's not the word's fault necessarily, it's that folks are lazy. People are lazy and they don't want to have to really tackle and define the real challenging business or tech

issues that they're facing. That's hard. This is very hard to actually identify and then solve these tough business problems. It's really hard work. So it's way easier to just use a phrase or a term and to take a shortcut, especially if you're an executive, and then you foist the actual problem onto your underlings and it's their job to actually figure out, Okay, well, how do we do the thing that our boss wants us to do when all

our boss says is cloud compute or digital transformation. To me, this is kind of like the underpants gnomes in South Park, You know the underpants domes. They say phase one is collect underpants, phase two is something, and phase three is profit that's what a lot of these buzzwords are. You know, the buzzwords are phase one, Phase two is completely undefined, and then phase three is somehow huge success. And I'm sad to report again it usually does not work out

that way. All right, So what's next? Well, I guess, I mean, I didn't want to have to do this because I really don't like covering these kinds of things, but it's time to tackle blockchain and the related buzz terms around that. So blockchain is a thing, right, I'm not saying that blockchain doesn't mean anything. It absolutely does mean something. It's mostly a thing that people associate with cryptocurrencies because that's where it's seen the most use and

I would argue the most success. But blockchain evangelists proclaim that blockchain is going to underpin the entirety of the Web of the future. This will play into a another buzz term we'll talk about shortly, web three. Now, these evangelists aren't always super good at articulating how blockchain will actually underpin the web of the future, just somehow that it will, and often a lot of details get glossed

over in the process. I mean, blockchain has a lot of challenges facing it too, Like a lot of those systems are very slow, they're inefficient, some of them are extremely thirsty for electricity if it's based on a proof of work approach to blockchain. So there are a lot of issues that evangelists usually don't directly address, and they have pretty glib answers if you start asking follow up questions. But what does blockchain actually mean? Well, basically, a blockchain

is a record of transactions. Typically we're talking about a decentralized ledger, meaning this ledger does not exist in any one given computer, it is distributed across lots of different computers, and this ledger is a record of all these transactions. And not only is it a record, it's viewable by a collection of stakeholders. So in some cases those stakeholders could be everyone who is connected to and is using

the system. So in other words, it's as public as it gets, right, as long as you are part of the system, you can actually view the ledger. But in other cases, we could be talking about a closed blockchain and which only a select number of parties have access to that ledger, even if the blockchain itself is a foundation for a service that lots of other people are using. So you might have tons of people using, say a specific cryptocurrency, but only a small collection of stakeholders are

able to actually view the ledger itself. That is problem number one. Actually, often I hear or read about projects that are pitched to be built on top of a blockchain, and the implication is that this makes the system inherently transparent. It doesn't. For example, there was Facebook, which is of course now called Meta, and Facebook's attempt to ch a cryptocurrency initially called Libra, later it was called DM. Actually technically Libra itself was I think the second name for it,

but Libra and then DIM. The blockchain serving as the foundation for this particular cryptocurrency was going to be the domain of a consortium of companies that initially was called the Libra Association, later became the DM Association. So instead of a community of users all having access to this distributed ledger of transactions, it would be this consortium. But that ultimately did not work out. The whole project got bogged down, a ton of companies that initially had signed

on to be part of the consortium bailed on it. Ultimately, the consortium sold off what few assets it still had to a bank called Silvergate Capital for a couple hundred million dollars. At least that was the belief. The money amount was never made public, but then Silvergate subsequently shut down the following year. Because this stuff is hard, y'all. I mean, if Facebook can't do it, it's really hard.

We'll come back to that when we talk about the metaverse. Anyway, the selling point for blockchain technology is that the record of transactions is both transparent and it is reliable because each block of transactions is cryptographically linked to all the previous transactions in that ledger, and we'll be linked to all subsequent transactions in that ledger. And this means that no one can tamper with the records of previous transactions.

If you went back and tried to change the record further back on the list, like let's say it's three blocks back, well, that would actually make changes to the next two blocks. It would be impossible to hide. So

there's no bacxies. Every transaction is permanent. You know, you could do a new transaction with the exact same assets, right Like if you had purchased something and then you wanted to turn around and sell it you could do that, but you couldn't purchase something and then go back and erase the record of you purchasing it so that you magically get your cryptocurrency back. You can't reverse an earlier

transaction that way. So this leads some to say, aha, we can use blockchain to serve as the bedrock for all online transactions. I mean, you could do it to keep record of like buying a house. You know, you enter that transaction into a blockchain that shows proof of this transition of ownership of the property. No one else can claim to own your property. You've got the record

right there, and it is unalterable and irreversible. So the blockchain will show that the transaction happened and will serve as proof that ownership has changed hands. Moreover, it can serve as a record for digital transactions, which are a lot more whibly wobbly than stuff that you can buy and sell an actual meat space. So, for example, let's say I wanted to buy a clip of music. Maybe I even want a smart contract that gives me the license to use that music clip in some other work,

such as an episode of a podcast. Well, you could set that up on a blockchain ecosystem to show proof of this transaction, and that could stand as the record indicating that I, as a customer, have legally purchased the license to use a clip of someone else's music in my work. Now that's just one hypothetical example. This does tie into n fts or non fungible tokens. But there was obviously a huge problem with NFTs as they rolled out, Namely,

they became a target for insane and unsustainable speculation. So folks were buying up NFTs with the expectation that these digital assets were going to escalate in value, and a lot of companies got in on the NFT craze. They saw it as a way to essentially print money, or they were afraid of being left behind, and ultimately the NFT bubble popped and laid waste to the entire landscape, and it also did an enormous amount of pr damage

to the NFT concept as a whole. So even folks who were coming up with undeniably interesting ideas for NFTs found themselves scrambling for interest and support because the speculative market had burned so many people. Okay, we're coming up on the last third of our podcast and speaking of thirds, we'll be talking about Web three next, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, we're back and we're going to talk about web three now.

A lot of the buzzwords we've talked about so far have an actual meaning, right, They do have meaning to them, but often there's this issue of people misinterpreting or misusing the terminology, misconstruing something, and then the meaning of those other terms gets a little fuzzy. Web three is not like that, though, because it doesn't really have a definition. It's kind of like the term metaverse, which we will

talk about in a second. In fact, I would argue web three and metaverse are very similar in that regard. They are both words used by people to make some pretty vague statements about a kind of hazy future of

online interaction and commerce and society. But once you start to dive down into it, you start to discover that there actually are a lot of different takes on what these things are ultimately going to be, and so it doesn't seem like anyone's really on the same page, Like there are a lot of similarities, but there are a lot of differences too, and this ultimately means there's not a really meaningful way to talk about these kinds of things.

But you still have companies jumping on board in an attempt to establish a presence in an undefined field or else lose some sort of unknowable advantage. So generally speaking, most versions of Web three share certain qualities. One of the big ones is decentralization. So a big criticism of the current web is that power and influence gravitates toward

a few massive players in the space. We're talking big companies like Amazon and Google, for example, and there's no denying it, Like, there are certain companies that have a stranglehold on the massive amounts of data that pass over the Web, And so the thought is, wouldn't it be better if we democratize that power somewhat? We took it so that the next version of the Web is not entrusted into the hands of these corporate mega giants, but

rather to the users. You know, that's what evangelists like to say, put the power in the hands of the users, which is kind of like tron. Critics of Web three say that most of the Web three implementation ideas would really just create different power brokers for the Web. It wouldn't be the big companies that we talk about, the big tech companies, but it would go into the hands of a wealthy subculture that would be able to afford to act as the cornerstones of this new web. So

really it doesn't democratize who owns the web. It just designates different stakeholders, the folks in charge of overseeing the various systems that Web three is actually built upon, which usually involves some kind of blockchain technology and token economy. Now I don't mean a token economy. I mean an economy based upon the minting, buying, selling, and trading of digital tokens. And we heard a lot of buzz about

Web three just a couple of years ago. And to be clear, there are still companies that are working toward making something along the lines of a Web three implementation happen. But the excitement around this has fizzled out quite a bit. And I honestly I think that artificial intelligence has managed to drink an awful lot of tech milkshakes. So you can also look at the metaverse as an example of this, where some of that excitement has been ported over for AI.

In fact, according to Gopal Solanki, who wrote a piece on Medium that's titled is Web three dead already? He said investment in Web three companies has fallen by more than seventy five percent in twenty twenty three compared to the levels it had in twenty twenty one. He went on to say, we cannot say that Web three is dead, but it has surely failed to deliver the promises it made. Each innovative idea presented in the form of renovated web version has turned into complete dust on unless it has

something to do with the native cryptocurrency token. All the developments and projects introduced in the Web three hype are majorly underperforming. That seems to sum it up to me. I can't disagree with that, and not to say that something called Web three won't come down the line, but in the meantime, that term is largely without meaning, and it's mostly used by people who are scrambling for funding for something that's unproven and potentially no better than what

we already have. In fact, potentially it could be worse. Things like transmission speeds and stuff could be drastically affected because again, blockchain transactions are not the most efficient. So if you build everything based on blockchain transactions like online commerce is completely based on blockchain. It could mean that it's just overwhelmed that it's far too slow to deal

with that level of responsibility. All right, Well, then let's tackle metaverse and mixed reality, more stuff that went through the hype cycle and recently has struggled to remain relevant. Starting off with the metaverse, we're talking about a concept that, again, like Web three, does not have a firm definition. There

are a distinct lack of details. Generally speaking, most definitions, if you can call them, that, imply a persistent virtual world in which you can explore and socialize and shop and create and consume, kind of like a computer generated alternate reality to the reality we experience if we step outside our houses. Some versions of the metaverse tap into similar stuff that we hear about in Web three, like

cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Other versions of the metaverse focus more on the virtual reality aspect and things like creating your own avatar and being able to maneuver around these virtual environments.

Some versions of the metaverse describe a huge, interconnected series of virtual worlds kind of hosted by different intit so there might be one that's owned and operated by Meta and another one owned and operated by Amazon, and maybe they're interlinked together so you can pass through from one to the other, kind of like how the web itself is a big interconnected series of web pages, but instead you're talking about a virtual world with like three dimensional

virtual space, but like web three. A lot of the enthusiasm and excitement around the metaverse has kind of gone cup put in recent years. There was a flurry of excitement about the metaverse idea for a while, and you had people and companies that were rushing to establish a presence on various platforms, claiming that these platforms would become pillars of the upcoming metaverse. But you don't hear about

that as frequently these days. It kind of blows my mind that virtual real estate sold for real money, sometimes a significant amount of real money, even before any such platform had established itself, as you know, a real thing that people wanted to go and spend time at. It's kind of like this wild land rush, except land in the real world is a finite resource, and the only thing stopping yet another company from launching a virtual real

estate company is computational hardware. Scarcity is not really a thing in the digital space, which again brings us back to the challenges of digital assets and transactions anyway. Obviously, there are still companies that are working on creating a metaverse, but the question I have is how many folks are actually itching for a metaverse. I wondered that from the very beginning. I definitely wonder it. Now. Meta has spent

billions with a b of dollars on such efforts. It continues to do this, much to the chagrin of investors, and I am still not convinced that those efforts will have a good return on investment. Maybe we'll get some virtual environments out of it, and some of them might even be really good and compelling experiences, but I don't know that that's going to be enough to get the results needed to make those billions of dollars a sound investment. I don't know if it's going to make that, you know,

the metaverse the future of online interaction. But then again, I'm not a genius anyway. There are tons of barriers that the metaverse will have to overcome in order to become a real thing. And real thing you can put in air quotes. I guess, assuming that you know it does involve virtual reality. One of the hurdles for the metaverse is the cost to the consumer, because VR headsets

aren't cheap. Now, there are some headsets that are significantly less expensive than earlier models, so they aren't necessarily as expensive as they used to be, but they're still not cheap. And computers are really versatile technologies, right, You can do

a lot of stuff on a computer. Now, you could arguably do most of that same stuff, if not all of it, while wearing VR gear as well, But that requires a lot of work to design a really good user interface so that the person who's wearing the VR gear can do whatever it is they want to do in a way that makes sense and feels natural. But if you can already do pretty much all of that stuff on a computer, you know, with the exception of being in an immersive virtual environment, I'm not sure the

sales pitch is good enough to get people to buy in. Also, this whole concept of an online world that is persistent and virtual and even three dimensional isn't new. Folks have been talking about that for years. Heck, you watch old Hollywood films that represent the web, and it almost always has someone seeing at a computer, and it looks like they're playing some sort of weird first person shooter navigating through stuff, because that looks way more exciting than just

staring at a page full of text and hyperlinks. Right, But you know, navigating through a virtual space in order to get to a destination has never made much sense to me. Like, instead of having websites, having you know, maybe like a virtual mall of stores and you have to wander around in order to go to places, that just doesn't make sense. Clicking on a link is super fast and efficient, and sure you could build that kind of capability into the metaverse, you know, maybe you make

it a voice command. But is the experience of just teleporting from one virtual spot to another, perhaps, you know, just to do some shopping, or maybe even just check the news. Does that really sound like an experience most people want to have, because I think it would be pretty disorienting and distracting and inefficient. You could do it so much faster just using a computer or a smartphone.

But really, whether you think like I do and you find the whole metaverse concept puzzling, or if you think it's a great idea, there's no getting around that. Tons of folks and companies. We're using metaverse as shorthand for this is the future. Nearly every press release or announcement I saw relating to the metaverse said very little apart from we're forward thinking and we're super cool, without you know,

doing anything to back up those claims. Just as cloud computing and digital transformation can be used as buzzy shortcuts to avoid addressing real challenges, I feel like the metaverse and web three come across as more or less meaningless terms used to proclaim relevance. You know, they might not be anything today, but maybe tomorrow. Right, you'll see and you'll see it from us, because we're hip and we're with it. Okay, I'm really old, So maybe I'm just

way too cynical. Maybe it's brought on by the fact that a lot of early attempts at showcasing ideas that are at least intended to be incorporated into the metaverse have been a bit disappointing. This brings me to mixed reality now, y'all. I love me some mixed reality. I'm not as big on VR these days. I acknowledge that VR is the far more successful end of the mixed reality spectrum. VR at least has established use cases in

the form of gaming. My problem is physiological because as I get older, I get more prone to motion sickness, which stinks. It's not the technology's fault necessarily, unless latency is really bad, in which case it is the technology's fault. But you know, I used to be the guy who would ride a roller coaster two dozen times in a day and think nothing of it. Now, if I ride two different roller coasters in a row, I have to

lie down for forty minutes, So that's on me. But VR has a place at the table, right It's an established technology, and there are some great VR games and experiences out there. It's still not necessarily a large enough library of experiences to get a critical mass of users on board, but the audience for VR tends to be fairly enthusiastic or at least curious to try VR stuff.

I do know a few people who have VR setups that have gone untouched for you know, long enough for them to gather dust, So I don't know how common that is. I'm sure there are people who use it every day, you know. I've got a friend who uses VR to do exercise with beat saber and that's you know, she's not alone. Lots of people do that. It's on the augmented reality side where I am actually the most interested.

But I simultaneously have to admit that not nearly enough has been done in the AR space to make it really useful outside of some very specific implementations. And I think it's easy to imagine how AR could be useful, Like if you can overlay digital information on your view of the real world around you. There are countless ways to make that really useful, everything from just entertaining to genuinely answering questions or letting you do things more efficiently.

But while the technology has potential, we haven't really seen that potential realized, and it's been a challenge so difficult that even Apple appears to be struggling with it. Apple launched the Vision Pro earlier this year. The year in question is twenty twenty four for many of y'all listening from the future. An initially word was that despite the incredibly hefty price tag of three thousand, five hundred dollars for the base model of this headset, the company was

actually going to sell out of its initial production run. However, it's just a few months later and the story has changed. An Apple analyst named Ming chi Quo posted that the company was cutting orders by nearly half for the rest of twenty twenty four, downgrading the expected unit sales that initially were projected to be seven hundred to eight hundred thousand units down to four hundred thousand to four hundred and fifty thousand, which is a big old' oof because

demand dropped very quickly. Wes Davis of The Verge posted an article recently that said he was finding listings on eBay in which the headsets were selling for far below market price, and Davis says it stings to know that he could have waited and purchased a Vision Pro for much less than what he actually paid for it when

it first became available. But really, I would argue that's just the tip of the iceberg for consumer pain when it comes to mixed reality, because I think the real problem is that, facing a lack of a really big user base, developers don't have a lot of reason to make applications for AR hardware, because why would you spend your time and your energy and your skills making something

that hardly anyone is going to get to use? But if developers don't embrace the hardware, then consumers don't really have an incentive to shell out the considerable amount of money it costs to buy one of these headsets. It's a catch twenty two issue, right because I don't want a vision pro because I feel there aren't enough applications for it. But no one's going to build applications for the vision proh because people like me don't want to

purchase one. And then it's very possible that Apple will either have to scale the tech way back so it can introduce a significantly less expensive headset, which presumably would have far fewer features and make it less attractive, or just back away from the effort entirely and say this one is a loss. My whole point is that if Apple, with its famous reality distortion field, can't get mixed reality to work in the market, it might just be too

early for that technology to take hold. Now, maybe someday it'll be a big success, but it's going through its own rough time, kind of similar to how VR really struggled after a similar issue in the nineteen nineties after that hype cycle kind of deflated. And this brings me to a conclusion as well as a general warning that

I think it's really good to remember. If someone is pushing very hard to sell you an idea, whether that idea is AI, it's web three, a blockchain, or the metaverse or mixed reality or anything like that, it often indicates that the person talking to you is heavily invested in that particular technology, and in order for their investment to pay off, they need to get other folks to

buy into it. Now, I don't mean to say that all of these ideas are ultimately nothing more than a pyramid scheme, but they sure do operate that way in the early days, and you don't get paid out unless folks lower down the chain buy in. So buyer beware is what I'm saying. Use critical thinking, make sure you ask questions and make sure that the answers are satisfying and that they mean something, and it's not just filled

with buzzwords and jargon. And for the leaders out there, really think about different ways you can communicate your ideas that aren't necessarily reliant on buzzwords, that actually do define challenges and problems and solutions, because otherwise it starts to sound like you're using language to cover the possibility that you don't know what you're doing, and that's not a good look at all. Doesn't serve anyone well in the

long run. All Right, that's it. Like I said, there are tons of other buzzwords that we could include here, and maybe I'll do another episode in the future with more of these, but I thought this was a good roundup for an episode like this. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.