About Mike Boland
Mike Boland, Chief Operating Officer at Triumph, has been active in discussions on emerging technology and local economic trends. In a 2017 interview, Boland compared the state of virtual reality to the early iPhone era, noting that the industry faces a "chicken-and-egg dilemma" where limited hardware adoption constrains content development and vice versa. He predicted that price competition, such as Oculus Rift's bundle price cut, would help address this, and argued that augmented reality would ultimately be a larger opportunity than VR due to its potential for all-day use across commercial sectors like retail and manufacturing. Boland advised VR companies to focus on accessible platforms like Google Daydream and Gear VR rather than high-end hardware.
Boland has also spoken about the "uberification" of local services, describing the on-demand economy as a transformation not seen since the commercial internet emerged. In a 2015 webcast, he discussed the rise of mobile-driven demand aggregation and its impact on how people work and buy. Separately, in a 2015 presentation on sustainable park management at the Presidio of San Francisco, Boland detailed the Presidio Trust's efforts to achieve financial self-sufficiency, reforest with disease-resistant trees, and create programs like a fish amnesty station to balance ecological stewardship with public use.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Mike Boland's recent appearances.
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Transcript (5 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Mike, you are in VR our industry. What is happening in 2017? What do you predict?
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Mike Boland0:02
Sure. So I like to say that we're in an iPhone 1 moment right now with VR. You probably remember the iPhone 1 in 2007. We're now 10 years after that. The iPhone 1, people always forget that there were only 17 apps on it for the first year until 2008 when the App Store came out. I always bring that up for a few different reasons. One, because from that point forward, there was a lot of innovation that happened in the subsequent years where a third-party developer ecosystem started to do creative things built on that hardware foundation. That's exactly what we can expect from VR in the future. That's really kind of utilizing all of the aspects of the platforms to do cool things that weren't really thought of when VR first came out. So we're talking again with that historical parallel with mobile, things like everything from Pokemon Go to Uber. Those are things that really weren't envisioned when the iPhone first came out. So that level of innovation, I think we're starting to see now. It's kind of hampered right now though with a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma that we often see in early stages of emerging technology. For example, there aren't enough apps yet to really sway the masses to buy the hardware. Conversely, there's not enough hardware out there for app developers and content creators to justify the business case of investing in all that content. So I think we're going to start to see some of those things chipped away this year and next year with things like pricing coming down. We just saw Oculus Rift at GDC lower its pricing for the Touch controllers bundled with the headset. So I think we're going to start to see that price competition and then more content that kind of chip away at that chicken-and-egg dilemma.
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Interviewer1:43
It's not only VR that we're experiencing, it's AR as well. And I heard you mentioning earlier that you think AR has more potential. How is that? And what should our companies be thinking about to be able to survive?
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Mike Boland1:55
Yeah, so AR, I think it's going to be bigger but it's going to come later. There are a lot of technical reasons why it's going to come later, but the reason I think it's going to be bigger is that it is going to be more applicable to a wider range of commercial areas, such as commerce and retail and manufacturing and design and lots of other things. There's another metric I look at as an analyst, which I call time with media per day. We spend a certain amount of time per day with media, subdivided with a lot of competing media like television and radio and everything. If you look at VR in that light, it's really only tenable to be consumed for a certain amount of minutes or hours per day, and that limits its market growth. Whereas AR, we're not there yet, but eventually because of its lesser degree of immersion, can be essentially worn throughout all waking hours. So that kind of time of media per day makes it, I think, a much larger opportunity. Now to answer your question about VR companies, I think that there's a lot they can do to really innovate. I think one of those is everyone is thinking of the more sexy tier 1 hardware like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR. I think the nearer term opportunity is actually to develop for some of the more accessible formats and platforms such as Google Daydream or Gear VR or even Cardboard. I think that those are starting to get better in quality, such as Daydream, but also have that nice sweet spot between wide accessibility, lower cost, but still a good enough experience for the mainstream to get behind.
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Interviewer3:25
Thank you. Thank you so much.
