Ask HN: In the next 5 years which markets will grow the most and why?
The more specific you are the better. Most people are terrible at predicting the future in this way. Some of the most accurate predictions sound like (or are) jokes at the time, like when JK Rowling was writing her first book as basically a "welfare mom." She did a lot of the writing while her baby napped at some eatery owned by friends/relatives. She would make jokes to the effect of "When my book gets famous, it will put your place on the map!" That basically all came true, from the book being famous to it making the place she wrote it famous too. But when you go back historically, predictions of what life would be like "now" all left out the world changing invention of computers and internet. There is a scene in the movie "The Graduate" where he is at a party and everyone is telling him what he should go into as his career because it will be big in the future. One person tells him "Plastics!" This was a joke at the time, a ridiculous statement. Years later, the plastics industry used that bit in a TV commercial. If you really, sincerely believe "The Future is all about X industry," you aren't telling people that on the internet. You are quietly behind the scenes buying more shares in X or getting training to work in X or otherwise trying to make sure you are the firstest with the mostest in X. 5 years out is not that hard, since it is basically which technologies that are either just out, or coming out soon will be successful. 10 years is more challenging, 20 impossible. Five years ago, tablets were basically cutting edge new tech. They were insanely expensive and crappy as hell. They often faced limitations in functionality because a lot of websites did not accommodate them. I know because I bought two of them 5.5 years ago and it was $2000 worth of computers and lots of stuff just did NOT work. Today, you can get a tablet for under $50 and Google is (or has) split its search stuff into PC and mobile search and is actively optimizing stuff for mobile because mobile search is eating the world. I seriously doubt anyone expected mobile to take over like this when it was new tech. In contrast, "net books" seem to have gone extinct. I think that was supposed to be The Next Big thing -- until tablets came out and began eating their lunch. 5 years ago, over 100 million tablets had been sold worldwide and the iPad was entering its 4th generation. Your description is more apt for 10 years ago. Well, according to Wikipedia, the history of tablets goes back to the 1800s. But I know for a fact that I bought two tablets on December 31st, 2011 that were priced at $2000 (after getting a 2 year internet service contract plus a 20% employee discount to reduce the price, I paid $800 up front) and it was kind of the hot new item at the time. And I know for a fact that proliferation of apps we have now was not the norm back then. I had enormous difficulty getting things done on it and I noticed that painfully because I essentially had no other access to computers at the time. I can now do all kinds of things on a tablet bought for under $50 that I could only dream of and wish for 5 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers Humorously: "Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014" was the huge headline summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker... http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketi... The first generation iPad launched close to two years before your example in 2010 at $499. I agree with the previous remarks - the tablet industry was pretty well established 5 years ago and hardly cutting edge tech - 10 years ago is definitely a better comparison at this point, with the crappy tablet devices Microsoft were pushing at much higher price points then. I personally think the market of add-on or web browser's extension. Why? Because, web browser is second most software used after operating system by a normal computer users. If you are developer you use editor and web browser, if you are writer you use world processor and web browser, if you are market person you use trading software and web browser and so on. I mean web browser is something used by everyone. We have written applications ( for computer and mobile device ) for most useful sotware - operating system to reach out our users. Now, it is time to target next software used by everyone. You might create a website but it will only be there until user do not close that tab. But, with extension, you will be in constant connection with user. Currently thid market is uder estimate as many developer consider that it is not something that consider as programming. But, I think every website specific limit to connect users. and at that situation, add-ons will come to rescue. I see the browser becoming the OS period. I didn't realize this until I got a ChromeBook and realized (with crouton) I can do everything I normally do on my Linux notebook. Do you normally just watch Youtube and use Google Docs on Linux? Because that's about where the set of things you can do on both ends All I need is a browser and a terminal since my development environment consists only of tmux/vim via Crouton chroots and Plex Web/Youtube/Google Music for entertainment. Why use Chrome OS at all if you're just gonna virtualize Linux? No with crouton you can install Linux distros in a chroot, it's a few keystrokes to switch to guest wm in practice however. Blockchain and cryptocoin markets will probably grow the most in the next five years. The total market cap for cryptocoins will grow from $50 billion today to $1+ trillion in the future. Second this. We've just started to fully appreciate the possibilities of the Blockchain particularly. I was reading some academic paper on analyzing and querying blockchain transactions and I found it absolutely outstanding. I'm also keen on seeing what large commercial projects are built on the Ethereum platform. Do you know how few people on HN even own any cryptocurrency? It's likely close to 1-2%. It's been like that for the past 5 years. Really? You have accurate enough information about the prevalence of holding cryptocoins on HN to throw around numbers? Major movie theaters and other retail stores in Phoenix, Arizona, accept bitcoin. It may not be 100% mainstream yet, but crypticurrency is going to explode in a big way As a customer, why would I want to use Bitcoin (instead of, e.g., a credit card) at a movie theater (or at any other type of shop)? For the of the thrill of not knowing how much actual spending power you have from one day to the next? I can't say whether you're right or not, but your comment caused me to laugh out loudly enough that people at Starbucks looked over at me. Thank you. Forgo a pizza a few years ago and end up with $20MM While I do agree that crypto-currencies might be a bit overblown, if you're right at 2% if HN readers having them, I'm actually more inclined to believe the OP is right. That's a lot of people. To me though, the only thing crypto-currencies currently are good for is buying illegal drugs on the internet. There just isn't any reason to use them over regular money the rest of the time. India. Because it will go from 100mn internet users to 1200 mn, enabled by a massive 4G/fiber deployment currently underway. Their economy has also been growing at about 7% per year. That's 40% over 5 years, which is around a trillion dollars (more in PPP). I agree. I think India is positioned to do quite well, but what happens to the pollution in five years? It's not going to magically become better. This is the thing lurking in the shadows that will cause major problems. AI in all its guises, such as self driving cars, virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, etc. Augmented Reality, I would suspect in a year or two we will have the first successful product. Services and entertainment for aging populations. Real estate auction services, Trump is going to have to sell of a lot after going to prison. Forgot solar power, batteries, roofs. Healthcare. Because a large portion of the population in the west (baby boomer generation) is getting older. Look at healthcare cost going up - this is already happening in all markets. People getting old and fat cost an absolute fortune to keep alive. Timescales are hard but...Ai will do mostly all of it and humans are being factored out. Humans will need not apply for real work, fake work could proliferate. Automation vertically integrated into robotic systems will prevail in mostly all sectors... Embodied AGI will autonomously operate under duress, capable of or superior to humans at warfare. This is already normal today to a lesser extent, but not publicly claimed by anyone. I believe this is so because a soldier never reveals his position. Superior Industries could be: computer hacking using AI, computers being used in new ways on a mass scale, super computer quantum computing, nanotechnology, organ replacement, DNA therapies, automated field doctors, 3d PTSD therapy machines, data thievery & recovery using AI. AI will cause crime sprees as new exploits using AI trump non-AI systems. Also, People plugging their brains into computers makes sense bc then we achieve intelligence upgrades.3d printers that print anything fast. Lifelong AI Buddies/monitors. Nostalgia Industries as old people feel really out of touch with the modern world. Propaganda and fake news bc they will be more effectively convincing bc AI. As AI really starts to prove itself superior People will question everything. Maybe we will want to colonize Mars bc it will make humans feel not obsolete. Who knows. Low cost cloud providers. No idea why there's not a low cost competitor to AWS, GCE, and Azure. And I don't mean just a VPS. Full service cloud with equivalents for EC2, ELB, S3, Lambda, etc. Outcompete Amazon (especially) on prices? Waiting to see who'll achieve that feat. That aside, there's a cost threshold beyond which it wouldn't makes sense to offer cloud services at such ridiculous prices. If anything, I actually think compute prices might increase in future as demand for cloud services become globally outrageous, from Alaska to Zagreb. I'd like to see the opposite of admining your own custom stack on vps or cloud instances. What I want is a really full featured walled guarden where compute storage and bandwidth are all metered and you just pay for what you use. Super cheap if you can live within the constraints. I'm talking mainframe style web app hosting, one giant server, you pay for a slice. No admining or provisioning of instances required. I thought something like Digital Ocean wasn't possible. AWS seems cheap, but egress is where they get you. > Low cost cloud providers... I second this. The 2 billion people coming online in the next decade will be from the developing world and the developers serving them wont pay the kind of fees that AWS et al currently charge for cloud services. Wrote a whole long response beginning with "my gut feeling is that markets are driven as much by politics as technology so Hacker News may not be the place to ask." Then said, man, that sucks. I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that. So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot. Turo is hot. Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid. a reaction to technology overreach in ours lives. People are sick of their phones, laptops, sleep tracking, social media. We want to reclaim our mind back. There is place in LA that does Buddhist retreat where you sit in silence for 1 week, its booked 8 months in advance. Person tracking. We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers). To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing. Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate. Maybe in the next 50 years, but not the next 5. There's about a 10-1 marketing to actual breakthrough ratio for AI changing our economy. I agree it will eventually, and has made some inroads, but it won't anytime soon to the extent where we have to solve problems of demographic shifts. There are few people I'm aware of who think to the contrary who are actually working at a technical level in the field of AI, and not founders of a startup riding buzzword funding or who have financial or PR interests to hype AI. I'll add a caveat that the invention of general AI would accelerate this timeline. I think it will require paradigm shifts, not feature-augmented/ exotic ensembles of neural networks with RL layers, or other approaches possible with current techniques, but think it is still more possible, sooner than AI skeptics believe, but still beyond 5 years. I think the nature of these revolutions is that they happen slowly but invisibly until one day all of a sudden everyone is aware of them. I wrote "AI", but it's not just AI, it's a lot of things that are coming of age. Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it). Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable. Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded. The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated. It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs. It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition. You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API. The medical cannabis industry!
- Science: as we pass the obstacles of regulation, more studies will be able to confirm (hopefully) what we suspect so far.
- Zeitgeist of our times is "going green".
- Damaged image of big pharma. The atheist generation will have grown up and begin to look for someone to tell them everything will be okay. It's a good opportunity to start a new religion. Also, some form of artificial companionship. A new religion based around what? Is this religion supposed to actually be believed? This is one of my favorite videos which explains why new religions don't have as much credibility https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PEg_Oys4NkA You have to watch the video to probably get the basic idea. I'm not Jewish despite the video focusing on Judaism. Which direction is the zeitgeist blowing? From my perspective, it seems that there is a real and ongoing erosion of local communities (labor, religious, or otherwise) that are replaced, often times, by a shallow virtual existence. It does not have to be a religion in the conventional sense, just something that attempts to give meaning to the meaningless. Tony Robbins fills that niche my three guesses (my company is in 1 of these areas): consumer internet privacy and security (think barracuda for the home market -- above and beyond a standard router/firewall possibly with active L7 features) consumer and enterprise storage management (they literally can't even make enough ssd's right now, people and companies are hoarding data and can't manage it effectively or reliably) rural and wilderness area wireless internet (people will start moving out of cities again and will want the same > 50 megabit low latency service). Fascinating... I had a similar list, and The company I work for is on it. Drop a line. Cryptocurrency. Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money. > How about across different banks? This is a solved problem in most of the world, except for US and Canada (Inside SEPA they're almost like a domestic transaction as well though it takes a couple a days) Second this. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, billions of people are going to come online over the next five to ten years. If (according to the World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/2-billion-people-worl...) there are really 2 billion people unbanked, we stand to see cryptocurrencies and cell phones lead to an explosion of people connected to the financial system. I send through transferwise. It's very fast and the exchange rates are very close to the forex rates - it was a lot easier and cheaper than using bitcoin. The trick is to match flows of cash so they money isnt actually transferred internationally - my cash from the uk was sent to someone else in the uk and my US bank account was credited from some other US-based bank. It's quite smart what Transferwise are doing. When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions). The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process. I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet. Crypto currency is very useful for transfers to difficult regimes and across many borders but I fail to see the case for a value add for distributed trust between banks (since there's generally an existing trust model anyway). There are other distributed technologies on the horizon where a cryptographic ledger is going to be super useful, but I don't see it for banks. Some mode of online social interaction that seems ridiculous now but will seem obvious in retrospect. This will be milked for ads and acquired by a big player while me-toos nibble the ends in the aftermath. The market will grow from zero to millions in this time, but it will be entirely consumed by one of the big five and everyone will just think of it as a Google feature or something. You've just described 2nd and 3rd generation AR I think food technology. As the worlds population grows, the demand for food and more productive ways to produce it will grow. I think semi-automated systems will become more automated using some of the AI that is in the news today. We may even see better automation on the programming front in terms of being able to create stuff. I think we will see more software and automation in government at all levels. There is drive to automate everything, but governments tend to be even slower than enterprise to adopt things given the budgetary process. Lastly, I think we will see some significant gains in genetic programming that come out of the CRISPR technique. If you recall the tech that allowed us to sequence the human genome was very slow at first. Eventually they developed faster techniques, and not you can sequence things an order of magnitude faster. There will be war. Anything that will protect us will do. Will be? There is. Indexing. Who needs Google when you have your own index? And I don't know about you but I can't get passed 16 pages of search results on google even though it has billions of results for the search term "contact us" (have it set to 50 per page) I will go ahead and make this prediction for the amusement of myself (hopefully) and others in 5 years. Here it comes: "AI will not become as big as people want to believe today." carpal tunnel syndrome specialists. 1) Weapon. Because of War.
2) Entertainment. Because of Pain. Support for trade schools and skilled vocational pathways (and vocational entrepreneurship) in place of four year university education for all. I think in the next 5 years desktop applications are going to be a thing again. Frameworks like Qt, electron, nw.js and others have made it very easy for developers to create desktop applications. I struggle with that suggestion. Which probably means you are correct. However we are seeing technologies like WebAssembly and WebGL which are directly addressing the benefits of desktop applications. What would a desktop application offer over browser based app? VR. People living in a place/time/body they physically aren't. When I'm old I'd like to VR to all the places I missed out on visiting because I was working too hard. I won't be alone. People have been banging on about VR for years, I don't see it ever becoming more than a niche thing. And people were banging on about personal mobile devices for years, then it all came together with the first iPhone. There are loads of these examples if you think about it. People expect these fast product deliveries form concepts but it takes time for hardware/software and execution to catch-up with potential. Kinda why I added it. I had people trying to convince me about it in 2000-ish. I do think we're getting closer and at some point we'll get an iPhone moment, where a silly idea becomes an obvious win. Health care. The boomers are entering their prime health care spending years, and Obamacare will engender huge industry profits from "spend all you want - someone else will pay the bill!". Anything to do with mitigating climate change, clearly we aren't going to do anything significant to stop it. Not a market per se, but there seems to be a lot of low hanging fruits related to machine learning. im betting my pennies on real estate food automation, healthcare, learning/edu tech AI, because everything and their grandma needs to be smart. That would be IoT.