That's a good question to ponder. I like small ideas that turn big. But I have no idea what it could be.

The web was public infrastructure that had commercial applications. Tim Berners-Lee and co. started it at CERN, Andreessen and others worked on it in universities, and Netscape commercialized it. What public infrastructure do we have now that could follow such a path?

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And I wonder about the economics and business model. How will it fit within the dominant business models today:

1. Facebook/Google "content + clicks" advertising model

2. the Apple/Android/Amazon locked device + pay for content model

I'd argue that those two business models sort of limit the universe of technological ideas that we consider (or fund if you are VC). For example, the only software you can really sell these days is SaaS (?)

The web is big because it overturned Microsoft's model of selling software, although honestly it took 10+ years to do that. And Microsoft certainly played a big role in the first dot com boom with IE and hotmail.

And you can argue that nobody made that much money in the first .com boom. Yahoo and EBay are probably the exceptions. Amazon really didn't until after the crash was over.

But Intel, Sun, Cisco, etc. made a lot of money by selling shovels. Maybe the analog today is that AWS and Google will make a lot of money selling cloud services to the next big thing? Maybe the incumbents have to "buy into" the next thing -- otherwise it will get squashed.

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Maybe it's useful to look back to a previous boom -- the PC boom of the 1980's. As far as I know, the killers apps then were word processing and spreadsheets (for small businesses). I'm reading "The Dream Machine" and it is pretty amazing how people wrote before word processors! I never experienced those days, but I remember my mom literally cutting and gluing snippets of paper to write her papers! But pretty soon she got a word processor.

There is probably some "invisible drudgery" in our lives today along the lines of "creating documents" and "making phone calls and mailing brochures to disseminate information that should be on the web". But it's hard to think of what that is!

I guess I will say that I have PLENTY of unmet needs. There is a lot left that computers "should" be able to do. "The Dream Machine" is reminding me of that -- the vision was augmenting humans, not replacing humans with magic AI that doesn't even work.

But maybe I'm too old or too cynical, but it's hard for me to think of things left that are both technologically possible (in the near term) and economically incentivized. It seems like we have the best version of "The Dream Machine" (interactive computing + global networking) that can be supported by known business models.

So I guess that's why people think the next big thing will require a huge technological innovation like AI, VR, driverless cars, block chain, etc.

I'd love to hear a rebuttal though!

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Another thing "The Dream Machine" is reminding me of is how all the ARPA funding on interactive computing stemmed from the military command + control use case. That was driven by the Russians getting the bomb in 1949 and Sputnik shortly after.

So here's my best prediction: there will be some cataclysmic security event. There have been some obvious ones recently, but you can imagine it being even worse. The trend is going in the right direction. That will kick off a boom in funding/tech for offensive/defensive seucrity.

I actually bought a computer security index fund a year or two -- it's NOT doing great. But maybe a public event will change this.

"Security" definitely falls under the category of "invisible drudgery", to the point that we don't do it! Every system we build is pretty exploitable for a low number of dollars!