It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius.

That was then, this is now.

Apple is about to release its Vision Pro. Apple has – or at least had – a rep for releasing fantastic products, and this just in. “Shortly ahead of its official February 2nd release date, Apple sent out a bunch of Apple Vision Pro units to journalists… but as Cult of Mac concluded, the $3,499 headset’s… killer feature might be neck pain…Three separate people reported feeling discomfort or even pain after wearing the headset for short periods. Each… also expressed some level of appreciation or even amazement regarding the Vision Pro’s immersive visuals. However, if strapping the headset on for a half-hour proves uncomfortable… that’s going to be a serious problem that no amount of spatial computing wizardry — or even an ugly strap — can overcome…YouTuber Marques Brownlee said he noticed the headset’s weight during his first two Vision Pro demos. But by the third? Sounds like the Vision Pro’s weight was almost overwhelming as the novelty wore off…”

So much for putting the user experience first, which was, at its inception, part of Apple’s DNA.

“To address the Vision Pro comfort problem, Apple decided to package the headset with two very different straps….As Erfon Elijah said on The CultCast, “One looks like you are from the future, and the other one looks like you have sleep apnea.”

There are problems with the product itself, re the technical issues, the fact that Apple Vision Pro Repairs Cost Up to $2,400 Without AppleCare+ (that’s $499/two years) and although we have not personally tested it, we wonder if the device, might be more aptly named, at least at this point, the Vision Con.

Then there’s Facebook. Prior to its launch, the Pentagon had a surveillance program called LifeLog, which strangely shut down the day Facebook was launched. And yes, in-Q-tel, the investment arm of the CIA, was an early investor in Facebook. Which no doubt helped the company to reach superunicorn status at breakneck speeds (Myth-Busting Silicon Valley: If America’s technology sector had a “founder” it was Uncle Sam).

“OpenAI is likely the decade’s superunicorn, and AI the megatrend,’ said Lee, observing that “Prior major waves of tech innovation have each crowned a “superunicorn”, a venture-backed co that grows to be worth >$100B+ over time e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Meta (Meta the only to be ‘crowned’ in <10 yrs)” and Apple, of course.

Lest we forget, the vast majority of these companies either crush, devour or prevent competition. Think the onerous policies of the duopolistic app stores and Epic plans to contest Apple’s ‘bad-faith’ compliance with court ruling over App Store.

Or they marginally comply with regulations. (“Google quietly updates Chrome’s incognito warning in wake of tracking lawsuit,” wrote The Verge. “This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google.”)

“Superunicorns have superpowers that help create and/or disrupt entire categories – like Netflix (worth more than Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros combined) and Tesla (> next 5 largest public automakers combined),” Lee noted.

True that and see above.

Even more concerning, Lee pointed out that “Superunicorn power may compound further in the coming years with software consolidation and tighter capital constraints for smaller scale players.”

Lee’s piece is a must read – as would be an analysis of what the funding that led to unicorn/superunicornhood and the consolidation of power in Big Tech has bestowed on the world. Good to know who, but also important to examine how and why.

FOMO may be a trait associated with unicorns, but is not one even remotely associated with visionaries. The latter don’t follow the herd: they forge their own paths. In the lockdown days, Google Secretly Tracked People…collecting location data…of its users even after they had disabled location tracking, and Microsoft followed suit: This Microsoft Teams update will help enforce social distancing rules). Never mind that Fauci Admits to Arbitrary Rules That Boosted Mass Surveillance and Suppressed Opinions and were not grounded in science.

At least some parts of the tech sector was created by true visionaries. The current unicorns are anything but that, and as for users who blindly embrace the latest shiny object that they release, in a twist on the Apple ad, here’s to the crazy ones. David Bowie said, “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” As for these current market leaders, before one quickly and thoughtlessly embraces their latest offerings, consider:  these are companies, their agendas aside, that will seize on the latest trends, devise algorithms to predict 50 years into the future – yet can’t seem to see just six feet in front of their noses. Onward and forward.