February 2026
“The pace of change is so great, there is always something else going on. What that says to me is that you have to have strategic vision and peripheral vision. Strategic vision is the ability to look ahead and peripheral vision is the ability to look around, and both are important.”
– Carly Fiorina, CEO Hewlett Packard
“Any given program, when running, is obsolete.”
― Unknown
The last time I did this exercise of writing about all the technology I used was almost a decade ago. I went back and read that essay as research before writing this one and I was truly shocked to see how much had changed. Literally nothing was the same, I don’t think I use any of the same technology as I used to back then except for the Meta suite in Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and the Google suite of Calendar, Gmail and Maps. The only not massive company whose software I use is Dropbox. Which says to me how rapidly the pace of change has been in that time period.
A few things stood out to me immediately, how much smarter everything is. It used to be my Polar heart rate watch would just track my heart rate and sleep and I would have to infer the usefulness of the information. Now I use a Oneplus Watch 2 and it is literally 10X more effective with the amount of information it gives you and how useful it is. This same principle applies across everything. The amount of information all applications give you has 10Xed in that time.
Oneplus has pretty much taken over my life, it’s a premium Android brand known for long battery life, fast charging and high storage across all their products. I have a Oneplus Watch 2, Oneplus Buds Pro 3 Bluetooth headphones and use a Oneplus Nord CE 3 5G phone. I use this because it’s the highest quality phone I could find that still has a headphone jack.
Because I have Sennheiser HD 380 PRO headphones that I love and are analog with headphone jacks. I’m an audiophile and I’ve never found anything remotely close to it. Plus I hate relying on batteries that can die. In terms of machines, I use a Windows Surface Pro Black laptop running Windows 11 which is a high end business computer. It’s excellent at everything construction, programming and software. Plus it’s extremely satisfying to write with.
The important thing that has really changed in the last decade is back then I didn’t have the money for redundancy, now I do. So everything I use on a day to day, I have in multiples. It sounds a little dumb but I have 2 of those phones, 4 of those laptops, 6 of those bluetooth headphones. I’ve fully embraced the idea of redundancy where I keep a set of everything in every location of my house that I could use them in.
There are effectively 4 office spaces in my house that my wife and I use. So I just keep a laptop and headphones in each of them. Running Dropbox so every computer is always upto date and synced all the time so you can still throw away any individual machine. Having so many also means if anything dies, there’s another one charged and ready to go.
This was especially helpful when my daughter would have bad sleep regression nights and the headphones would frequently die because of how long the night would go for. She used to wakeup for 2-4 hours every single night for months on end. Then she’d give me a break for a month or two, then wake up again every night for months. Not having to think about batteries anymore took a huge mental weight off my mind. Just knowing I always had something charged and available at all times.
In the physical world, I don’t know how to say this exactly, but everything became sexier. The watches and phones and laptops all became better looking and better feeling. They literally feel better in my hand. Phones and laptops and watches used to be made of plastic and were colourful, now it’s all steel and black. Everything feels and looks sleek and luxury. So the feeling of everything became a lot more premium in the last decade.
Alongside this there’s been 2 tectonic shifts that have been present my whole life that are right at the precipice of change and it’s never going back. Australia is phasing out the sale of petrol vehicles by 2030 and the big car companies have been preparing for that much earlier. We’re a Toyota family and cars no longer use petrol and likely never will again.
Not having petrol has changed how we think about travel, doing unnecessary driving no longer has a cost associated with it. Plus cars now all have Android Auto and Apple Carplay so the car itself is like an extension of my phone. Having a map in front of you while an audiobook plays has been game changing.
The second major shift is solar panels and solar batteries. These used to be prohibitively expensive but in the last decade Moore’s Law has made them extremely affordable. Power used to come from coal plants generating it, now it comes from the house itself and stored in batteries. Then you draw on it overnight.
My power bills used to be super expensive but now they’re almost not existent. This is a huge lifestyle change. We don’t care about how long we run our lights and appliances anymore. We’re happy to leave air conditioning on all day and so on. So our home is a lot more comfortable and we’re able to get a lot more utility out of it having what is practically infinite power. You can now do power intensive tasks like heat a swimming pool with no costs.
Within the software world, everything is now Artificial Intelligence or AI. I haven’t Google Searched anything in almost a year. I go and ask Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI whenever I need information. They always go beyond standard search by giving me additional context and information. Sometimes they even build custom software on the fly for me to help me understand something or some financial analysis modelling I’m doing. Software development is done in Windsurf with the AI as the tool writing the code.
AI can also automate almost all the tasks that I used to have a whole bunch of different pieces of software to do. For example, I had a paid subscription to Right Inbox for sending automated email reminders. I paid them for 10 years from 2015 to 2025 and only last year I finally cancelled that subscription because AI could do what they did but for free.
This happened across everything, I’ve almost gone through and cancelled every subscription to every piece of software I have because that functionality can now be done better and more customised with AI. The subscriptions have been changed to just paying Anthropic for Claude and OpenAI for ChatGPT and Windsurf for implementation. Often with Windsurf and Claude I can build my own custom software for single use cases which is something I could never do before. So overall I use much less software but what I do use is much more capable.
I think over the years there’s been a consolidation of software where big companies have been slowly picking off functionality one by one and adding it to their product suite. So niche software companies which used to be a great business to be in has been attacked on both sides. On one side by custom AI tools and on the other side by large software companies. An example of this is I used to pay for Calendly but then Google Calendar now does the same thing but for free.
The world of software products is both simultaneously exploding and also compressing which makes it both simultaneously easier and also more difficult to build a software product and technology company. Speaking to friends who do this they say just about all of their products are becoming obsolete at a rate they’ve never seen before. People who were millionaires only a couple years ago are now seeing their userbase churn beyond belief.
Then when they build and launch new products and features to acquire new customers, within weeks that functionality is being copied by free competitors. Wrecking their ability to charge for it and competing the market down to zero. It both enables them to build at a superpowered rate but also gives everyone that exact same superpower. So no tech product is safe from being disrupted anymore and the speed of disruption is faster than ever. Every piece of software is getting disrupted because the whole paradigm is changing.
Even the way they acquired customers is being disrupted. People with large search engine optimisation or social media referral moats that they relied on for years to get new users, what do they do when people use AI LLMs and stop searching for anything anymore? So both the software products are being disrupted as well as the way they acquired customers is being disrupted as consumer behaviour is changing.
While the rest of software seems to be consolidating, streaming services and entertainment is where things have gotten really crazy and there’s been a lot of growth. A decade ago, there was only Netflix that we’d pay for. Now we have a Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, Disney Plus, Crunchyroll, Paramount+, Rakuten Viki, Stan and Binge. Plus the Playstation, Audible, Spotify and Youtube subscriptions. To get everything we want to watch and listen to is like 15 subscriptions and costs hundreds of dollars per month.
The media companies have finally figured out how to get people to pay for content again and I love it. I prefer a world where media companies make their shows easily available and everyone pays for media instead of torrenting and stealing it. More money for the media companies allows them to fund more shows so it’s a universally good thing. The problem used to be everything you wanted was too hard to access, now that isn’t the case anymore.
So the major themes of this generation of technology is access, aesthetics, information and customisation. Everything looks and feels better, it’s easier to use than ever and more functional than ever before. It’s no longer about picking up a tool off the shelf and fitting yourself into it, it’s about figuring out what you need then designing a tool to wrap around yourself so it fits you perfectly. As a result everything feels more magical than it ever has before.
I used to think Google search was the most magical I could ever think of and it would never get replaced. The ability to search all known human history at your fingertips. But AI has taken that and made something better, a wizard that tells you everything you want to know at your fingertips. I think an AI world will be less polarised because the AI isn’t just serving you information that confirms your existing biases, it gives you the truth and a nuanced perspective with multiple sides without you even asking for it.
That’s a beautiful thing and I think with AI powering everything the next decade is going to see an explosion in human progress. Because it superpowers every single persons existing talents in a way that Google search could only dream of. Because the search paradigm could only find things that were already existing but with AI, you can invent brand new things on the fly that you’ve only dreamed and thought of. You can iterate at the speed of your creativity and bring your ideas into reality at a pace that has never been possible before. I for one am very excited to see what we do as a species with this.