I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different.
This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.
There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting.
I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring...
Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road.
I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic.
I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.
I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses.
What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.
Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.
And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.
Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.
We’ve had object technologies before in mainstream environments (OpenDoc, COM), and yet they’re effectively dead today. They were very complex, and the main pathways can be explicitly supported with better UX when the target apps are written with what’s supported in mind.
They are the figureheads of their respective companies. And just as the engineer builds the product, their job is to sell it. You'd be lucky to work for a company with people at the top as persuasive as Jobs or Musk.
Not really, people are not stupid. They can see through that.
How much of their insight comes from others (eg. senior staff, acquisition targets, etc.) and how much from their own noggin so to speak?
Or a better way to ask this might be, how would one go about replicating this insight if one is not a CEO of a tech company? What resources would I need to pull in, who should I be talking with?
They not always "see" it right. It is tough to forecast future in tech.
The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem.
I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc
But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one — it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will be.
Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how things will turn out.