I’m 43 years old, and I’ve been consuming technology products and working in tech basically my entire life, minus a year and a half where I worked for a catalog that sold garden gnomes. Nobody’s perfect.

But the “tech industry”, if that’s still a thing we can demarcate, has some real existential problems right now, the main one being that it appears to be completely out of ideas. Well, maybe not so much out of ideas, but out of ideas that aren’t just various commercialized versions of tech products and platforms senior executives read about or saw in movies as kids.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are two of the most well-capitalized guys on the planet. No matter how much money they lose, for whatever reason investors are happy to continue shoveling money into whatever they want to do, and that comes at a pretty significant opportunity cost — try getting a job in technology right now that isn’t about generative AI, for instance. It’s doable (I did it!), but it’s really, really hard. But these two guys are really sucking up just an almost incomprehensible amount of venture capital and pouring it into… I guess NVIDIA? And that definitely has a non-trivial effect on the marketplace of available ideas.

Still, the worst part is that… none of this is going anywhere, at all. These companies will probably, for a fairly long time, have really high paper values that these two guys (and others) will be able to use as collateral to borrow money, avoid taxes, and live like kings forever, sure. People will use ChatGPT, other people (probably less) will post on Twitter, and all of those people will make stupid cartoon pictures of themselves through prompts. Musk is cynical enough to know he needs to be integrated with the government — and in particular, defense — to generate the guaranteed, endless revenue stream he needs to finance his nerd fantasies, and he may succeed at that.

But… “the everything app” these guys are obsessed with is not coming. They’re not going to build it. No one is! There’s been a lot of corporate consolidation over the years (too much, in fact), but one thing that remains extremely numerous are apps. In the 2010s, Facebook clearly wanted to be “the everything app” — maybe it still does! But they had years to figure it out, infinite money, and an ambitious, sociopathic super-dork running the show, just like these guys — and they got nowhere at all with that.

We don’t need an everything app. We have an everything device, the phone. And all this capital is going towards trying to put an unnecessary, platform eliminating app layer on top of it even though (a) there’s nothing in it for consumers, who control some parts of their phone experience, and (b) there’s nothing in it for Apple or Google, who control the rest. The most incredible achievement Sam Altman has pulled off is convincing Wall Street (and the media, and even Apple and Google to some extent) that chatbots somehow undermine this moat, when they do not, at all, in any way. I mean… Facebook even tried to make a phone! They knew what was up!

(Search is different. Google dropped the ball on search and now their offering is bad enough, and hard enough to get value from, that ChatGPT’s bullshit machine is good enough for people, which is just an incredibly damning sign for the quality of search in 2025. But there’s actually money to be made/lost in someone getting search right, or at least less wrong than it is right now.)

This whole Ready-Player-One everything app idea is just a giant waste of money that will never turn into anything real. And real, interesting ideas and iterative improvements to things you’re actually going to use will continue to wither on the vine until we accept it and move on.