Google's search for future profit targets the Sun, not just the cloud
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Google's search for future profit targets the Sun, not just the cloud:

These humble-looking contraptions were revealed in a Google patent application for a “heliostat control system” that automatically adjusts solar thermal mirrors to their optimal energy-harvesting angle. […] Sound like a strange distraction for an Internet company?

Nope. Internet doesn’t exist without power. Therefore, Google should have an interest in the energy industry.

 

Imagine for a moment that you, ten years ago, started thinking about a world in which the major players were competing on the level not of their products but of their ecosystems. Then enters Apple/Google/Facebook.

The "who would have seen Apple and Facebook and Google being so influential back in 2001" point is now something we're familiar with. But back then it would seem a bit unfamiliar. Another idea that would seem a bit unfamiliar is a world 10 years in the future in which the major players compete again not based on their products or even their ecosystems of apps and data and developers, but the surrounding industries that provide resources and power as alluded to above.

The above thoughts remind me of that unfamiliarity, and remind me that we all get the microtrends (the gamifications, the connected screens, the cloud thinking, etc), and it's easy to think that follow "trends," but the macrotrends that the above article alludes to still catch all of us off guard.  

When people ask about trends I tend to find myself needing to distinguish between micro and macro trends, a model I've taken from Magnus Lindkvist's Everything We Know is Wrong!: The Trendspotter's Handbook. I'm guessing he'd refer to the above as a form of change blindness, the kind of change blindness that manifests in the inability to detect large change because it looks too different from our current model of the world.