Infrastructure itself doesn't make money. It's closer to debt. Roads and tunnels don't make money on their own; value only starts to emerge, indirectly, when cars actually drive on them.
The internet is like that. More broadly, networks themselves don't make money. Only when there's killer content that can manifest their value through the network does the network gain value worth recognizing.
Things of that same sort are IT (or ICT), IoT, O2O, blockchain, metaverse, and AI.
IT (or ICT), in the end, is technology for networks between contents (information). IoT is machine-to-machine networks, O2O is networks across online and offline goods, blockchain is networks of consensus among constituent nodes (members), metaverse is networks for online-native goods, AI is networks of meta-cognition among RPs (robot/engine processes).
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the metaverse -- these famous keywords that are said to be doing so well lately are undeniably innovations produced by humanity. But in the end, they're still only networks, still only infrastructure. To spell it out more concretely: they are not tools. They are tools for making tools, or tools (mediums) that make tools work. They're a revolution only in method of mediation.
Think about the factory automation that underpinned mass production in the Second Industrial Revolution. The factory, the automation in and of itself are mere hollow clouds you can't even grasp a handful of. But an automated factory as the platform to make a car -- that's a different story.
One of the keywords of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is "smart factory." Before we even look at the words "smart factory," consider the smart phone. Is a smartphone smart? Not really. The phone itself is only a medium; what actually creates useful value is the applications. Those who lived through the early smartphone market know the story: back then, plenty of people bought smartphones just to use KakaoTalk. The reason you'd bother buying a high-spec smart phone was to use a free messenger with others. We need to look back at how the market and users approached this new medium, and the mood at the beginning.
Looking back at that mood... not everyone can be Steve Jobs, but the big companies, who can benchmark with the best of them, probably can at least recognize what's going on.
In the blockchain and NFT markets, many smart people and enormous amounts of money are being thrown in. On its face it looks like a huge blue ocean, and can be perceived as an "intelligent" Fourth Industrial site... but put next to something like the old Saemaul Movement, the physical muscle of laborers deployed at expressways, railways, and large construction sites has merely been traded for muscles of knowledge -- labor of thought. It feels like only the infrastructure construction site has changed, while the flow of work and the value of its outcomes aren't all that different.
And this isn't just my off-the-cuff speculation. Humanity already knows this from experience. Maybe that's what's lurking behind my speculation too -- the 2000s internet bubble. IT -- the so-called information revolution -- began with the discovery of the internet, but that alone wasn't enough. It wasn't until around 2010 that the cooled-off information revolution finally settled in, thanks to killer contents like browsers, search engines, and e-commerce. And those who survived until 2020 are now newly acknowledged as "big tech."
So -- this is how IT, the earliest of the infrastructure-side networks mentioned above, has played out. What about IoT, O2O, blockchain, and the metaverse? How you think about them will depend on the industry you're in. What approach do you take? Is it an end-to-user question -- does the road need to exist before the car is built, or does the car need to be built first? Or do you need a gold-rush-era Levi's-style market approach? And so on.
Of course, infrastructure matters. Connection and networks are like air. Even the best car goes nowhere without roads or oil. Same for highly useful killer applications: without an App Store, and without the OS and smartphones that keep the App Store running, they're useless.
The issue isn't whether the keyword itself is useful. What matters is not whether I, or the organization I'm in, has dipped a toe into that useful-keyword market, but how useful the goods I can offer to the people spending money -- or wanting to spend money -- in that market actually are.
