Tech Trends for 2023

Tech Trends for 2023: three trends you need to watch for your small business.

Here are the three trends for 2023 to watch for:

Chips Dip
Subscription Fatigue
Social Media Madness

Chips Dip

The shortage of computer chips for various products such as smartphones, network equipment lingers on like a hangover from the start of the pandemic. China manufactures most of these chips. After a worker riot at the iPhone factory in Zhengzhou late in November, China loosened their strict COVID protocols. It will be interesting to see if chip production returns to pre-pandemic levels or if loosening COVID protocols will lead to lost time due to employee illness.

For now it is still very hard to get some items particularly business class network equipment.

The United States government is pushing for more chip factories at home however it will be at least 4 or 5 years before those factories can produce in bulk. I would love to see the Canadian government push for domestic chip factories. Canada has most of the minerals and metals required. chips dip

Subscription Fatigue

Is there no limit on to what big companies will slap a monthly fee? One of last year’s fee outrages was Adobe charging for a Pantone plugin. Graphic designers frequently use pantone colour numbers to match corporate branding (think logos, business cards, web site designs). The other fee change that really annoyed me was Microsoft put certain security features for Microsoft 365 that were previously available to all accounts into only available for the most expensive accounts.

These companies already have record profits for the last few years. Why are they adding these fees? And why, again with record profits, are they laying off employees, usually the customer support employees?

It’s getting more and more expensive to run a business because of the tech subscription fees. With the exception of certain monthly security ones, most of these fees are just gouging. You can get some relief by switching to annual fees if that option is available. Subscription Fatigue

Social Media Madness

Have you been following the Twitter Takeover meltdown? One of my favourite highlights from this saga is Elon Musk unplugging a rack of servers and then Twitter having its worst outage in years.

The Twitter takeover speeded up and magnified certain trends in all the social media companies that affect business.

The first one is that at any time some nut can take over the social media company you use to connect with customers.

The second trend is that social media companies start by making their business user friendly, then business friendly and then shaft both. We’ve seen this happen with Facebook. Facebook made it very easy to link up with friends and customers. Facebook then encouraged business pages and accounts. Then Facebook promoted their ad business (while not really disclosing that unless you spent $1000s a day you didn’t get the full benefit of their reach). Finally Facebook started penalizing business pages that didn’t buy ads. There is a much longer piece by Cory Doctorow about this process with TikTok and Amazon :

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

The third interesting trend from the Twitter meltdown is the flood of deserters to Mastodon a self-hosted social network. There is no advertising on Mastodon. If your customers went to Mastodon, you will have to product content for them. However a lot of the API developers (such as Twitterific), that Elon Musk that threw off Twitter with no notice, are now honing their skills for easy posting to Mastodon.