When a new, shiny product, service, or thing flies onto the market, I put it through The Gut Test.
The gut test is simple: does this new thing provide an obvious value to me, those around me, or society at large? Does it fix my hunger for something that's missing in my life? Does it make our lives better or potentially worse?
This is not a slow, methodical process. Sometimes I look at something new and just ask myself: Is this a stupid idea or not? And damn near every time my gut is right.
Historical Examples
Just to set the stage, here are a few known quantities - examples of where things passed or failed The Gut Test back in the day and how the market really responded to them.
Virtual Boy (1995)
- What My Gut Said: FAIL
- Why: Unimpressive red-tinted bitmap graphics in an uncomfortable desktop-mounted 3D headset. Even as an 11-year-old I knew this was whack. The subsequent Nintendo 64 did 3D much better and in a more practical way.
iPhone 4 (2010)
- What My Gut Said:: PASS
- Why: The iPhone packaged up several great concepts into a single easy-to-understand device that fit in my pocket. Obvious win, even if touchscreen keyboards seemed a little iffy at the time. The industrial design and refinement of the iPhone 4, however, is what cemented it as something that would stay.
3D TVs (~2012)
- What My Gut Said:: FAIL
- Why: High prices, limited content, weird fragile glasses - wait, glasses!? I need to wear special glasses to enjoy my $4,000 55-inch 3D TV? Hard pass.
NFTs & all-things blockchain (2020)
- What My Gut Said:: FAIL
- Why: Blockchain technologies were (and still are) too complicated for the average person to understand or care about. Who is seriously going to manage a complicated digital wallet for all this made-up digital currency? Not I.
The Latest Examples
So how do new and upcoming technologies do with The Gut Test? Let's give this a shot.
Foldable phones
- My Gut Says: FAIL
- Why: The modern smartphone form factor is basically decided: a big, rectangular slab of glass. Would I love a bigger screen on the go? Absolutely. Do I want to spend $2,000 for a few extra inches of screen, a mechanical failure point, and a tacky crease down the middle of my screen? No.
Autonomous cars
- My Gut Says: PASS... EVENTUALLY
- Why: I fundamentally believe that self-driving cars are a terrible idea for the vast majority of transportation needs - while they share the road with other human drivers. Cars were designed to be an extension of human free will, including all the intelligence and nuance that goes into operating a 3-ton vehicle through complex environments. When all vehicles are autonomous at the same time, we'll have achieved better, safer vehicle transportation.
Liquid Glass (iOS)
- My Gut Says: FAIL
- Why: Apple carried the best lessons of HCI from the 1970s and 1980s and defined modern computing interfaces. Design, acessibility, performance - and then did it again for mobile devices (see iPhone 4 above). And then they threw all that away for iOS 26. This isn't subjective - Liquid Glass has objectively bad UI design that negatively affects basic HCI principles. What happened at Apple?
"AI"
- My Gut Says: PASS... MAYBE?
- Why: As I find more day to day uses of GenAI, I'm slowly turning from pure skeptic to cautious optimist. With GenAI growth affecting every part of life nowadays (see next topic: data centers), it feels like there's a crash coming (and I believe it). But the truth is now obvious: GenAI-based tools are too useful to disappear entirely. This isn't the true artificial intelligence revolution that sci-fi predicts, but GenAI is certainly here to stay.
Data Centers in Space
- My Gut Says: FAIL
- Why: While I'm not a fan of seeing giant data centers go up in my backyard and racking up everyone's electric bills, putting data centers in space seems... excessive. I'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems like a colossal investment that doesn't make sense given today's technology (Who replaces faulty parts? What about radiation exposure? This is for the richest of the rich, isn't it?).
Virtual reality headsets (latest 2020's attempt)
- My Gut Says: FAIL
- Why: Ah yes, the latest round of virtual reality headsets that us glasses users can't even enjoy. We did this 50 years ago, 30 years ago, and now today. I'll admit that the latest stab at VR is far and away better than a Virtual Boy, but if we want to be engrossed in VR, we should keep aiming for a social Star Trek holodeck experience, not today's heavy, isolating headsets.
RISC-based computing
- My Gut Says: PASS
- Why: The past 40 years have been dominated by x86 computing and it was clearly the only path forward. RISC/ARM have always played a role in computing, but today's RISC-based processors are proving an obvious point: Moore's Law is dead and efficiency of computing (i.e. mobile considerations) is more important than guzzling watts from the wall to eek out more speed.
If you have an opinion on these ideas, find me on LinkedIn and let's talk.