Certainty is a poor substitute for curiosity.
Technology companies are often asked to predict the future.
There is a small problem with this: the future has a long history of refusing to cooperate.
Predictions are entertaining. Capabilities are more useful. A company that can learn, build infrastructure, attract unusually good people and change direction has more options than one that guessed one particular future correctly in a slide deck.
So our long view is less a prophecy and more a portfolio of questions.
The more useful discipline is to prepare for change.
Build strong underlying capabilities. Hire people who can learn. Preserve principles rather than products. Leave enough room in the architecture for the thing nobody thought to put on the roadmap.
That means separating principles from products. Privacy, trust, curiosity and usefulness can endure while interfaces, models, networks and devices change underneath them.
It also means avoiding the opposite mistake: using “long term” as permission to postpone all evidence. The next experiment should still be concrete.
That is why our long view includes ideas that may look far apart today.
Personal AI, infrastructure, new devices, robotics, mobility, communications and orbit all become more coherent when you think in capabilities instead of categories.
An intelligent phone, glasses, robotics and autonomy all benefit from identity, local intelligence and maps. Advanced networks and infrastructure matter when those capabilities need to operate globally. Commerce and the Foundation ask what all that capability can enable economically.
The categories are different. The underlying questions keep meeting each other.
Some of these ideas may become large businesses.
Some may become research projects. Some may teach us something valuable and then disappear. That is not failure of the long view. It is the long view doing its job.
Others may become a component hidden inside something more useful. Some will probably be wrong. We would rather discover that through research than protect an old idea because it once had a good name.
A long-term company should be capable of changing its mind without losing its direction.
We have a plan.
It contains quite a few question marks. We intend to keep them.