How to launch a tech product Create a slick, irony-free corporate safe space June 18th 2026 In the past month, Apple has announced upgrades to Siri, its voice assistant; Google has unveiled new search agents that can carry out tasks on your behalf; and Nvidia has revealed a new chip for personal computers. Each outlined these plans, and many more, at their developer conferences. It’s not just the titans who turn product roadmaps into theatre. Any self-regarding enterprise tech firm will hold a global conference for its “community” (Sapphire for SAP, Oracle AI World and so on). The likes of Salesforce and Stripe run roadshows taking the message to international users. These jamborees matter. Very occasionally, most obviously with the launch of the iPhone in 2007, they change the world. They provide investors, developers and users with information about a firm’s product pipeline. They
set deadlines for internal teams: all firms could benefit from a few fixed dates in the calendar where they have to show what they have been up to. But for anyone who thinks that the tech industry suffers from groupthink, these events do not reassure. It doesn’t take long to see a slickly inauthentic formula. Speakers hand off to each other by saying things like “And now here’s Kevin,” or “To tell you more about that, over to John.” A synth-laden electronic soundtrack, muzak for developers, will blast out while one person leaves the stage and the next person takes their place. (Apple does its launches on video; the camera will find Kevin, or John, lurking somewhere on its Cupertino campus.) Kevin or John will be wearing an open-neck shirt, dark trousers and shoes with cushioned white soles. The only people who can wear sensible shoes on stage are customers from a boring industry like banking: their function is to show that regulated industries are clients, and it is important they look staid. No one can wear a tie. If you see someone wearing a tie, they are a security guard. Kevin or John or whoever will stride into view, plant their feet apart and wait for the music to stop. They will look at the audience and, for reasons that are unclear, say: “Wow!” Then they will look at the autocue and start speaking. Every three seconds, they will raise their hands up from their sides and hold an imaginary cardboard box. To mix it up—they’re not robots!— they occasionally hold out their hands as though each contains a mango. Every two minutes they will move to one side of the stage, plant their feet and start doing the box or mango thing again. No matter what Kevin or John is announcing, they will say they are “super- excited” about it. They might be telling the world that they have discovered a way to teleport, or revealing that a device is now available in a slightly different colour, but it will be impossible to tell from their monotonically rapturous delivery. The product launch is a corporate safe space. Everything should be extremely rehearsed and come across that way. If a customer is invited on stage, sensible shoes or not, they will be asked things like “How excited are
you by our partnership?” and “Why is your company so great?” There will be a demo desk on stage, where someone can apparently type without using their hands. After announcing the latest breakthrough, Kevin or John will pause just long enough to make the audience think a reaction is expected. The lightest clapping, a susurration of applause, will begin. The autocue has not prepared Kevin or John for this, and they will stop in confusion. This will immediately silence the clapping. Kevin or John will personalise new product features by drawing on examples of how they use technology in their own lives. These stories will usually involve cooking or buying someone a gift. The idea is to show how incredibly normal they are. The effect is somewhat different. Most people have families; technologists live with participants in an extended alpha test. Irony will be everywhere but on stage. Kevin or John will demonstrate how easy it is to use technology to arrange a get-together with friends. They will talk about how unique humans are, how everyone on the planet has the potential to do extraordinary things, while never betraying any sense of individuality. Kevin or John’s segment will end just as it began. They will say, “And now here’s Rohan,” or “Over to Mike,” and walk off the stage while the giant screen behind them does something vibrant and the muzak starts up again. Rohan or Mike will stride on, stand just where their predecessor did, and say: “Wow!”■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/18/how-to-launch-a-tech-product
Tournament of losers The World Cup is a festival for corporate has-beens June 18th 2026 Money, it is often said, has ruined football. Staging the men’s World Cup mostly in America, a country that has produced so many great businessmen and so few good footballers, was supposed to mark the triumph of big business over the beautiful game. True, the ticket prices are extortionate. And the tournament often feels like a Silicon Valley conference circa 2016: this year referees have cameras strapped to their heads and each player has his own “digital twin”, whatever that means. Yet despite the pretences of the tournament’s organisers the business of World Cup football is a simple one, and a struggling one. The retailers, television stations, brewers and betting houses that make up capitalism’s
starting XI are an ageing and injury-prone lot. For some, this could even be their last tournament. That the world’s greatest sporting event has become a carnival of condemned companies is most visible on the pitch. On their left breast, players proudly wear their national badge; on their right, logos of faltering sports brands. Nike has dressed 12 of the 48 teams at this year’s competition, fewer than Adidas (14) and slightly more than Puma (11). The rest rely on faded giants (the Democratic Republic of Congo is the only customer of Umbro, a British brand that once outfitted more teams than any other) or local ateliers (Iran’s team is kitted out by Majid, a firm which shares its name with the country’s short-range missile-defence system). All three of the big kit-makers are worth less than they were in 2018, when France beat Croatia in an all-Nike final. Shares in the American firm, which has suffered a stunning fall from global cultural ubiquity in recent years, have lost three-quarters of their value since their peak in 2021. Competition from firms like On, a Swiss brand, and Asics, a Japanese one, partly explains the slide. Analysts say a paucity of exciting new products is a bigger reason for the industry's slump. It is hard to disagree. In the “Trionda” Adidas has designed a truly forgettable football. It is not beautiful like the “Telstar” (Mexico 1970). Nor does it capture the essence of the competition’s hosts like the over-engineered “Teamgeist” (Germany 2006). Players’ boots this year are striking, but strikingly similar: most are shades of pink. More worrying still are Nike’s new “Aero-FIT” shirts, some of which clearly do not fit. Stitching on their shoulder causes the shirt’s material to protrude sharply, giving the slight men who wear them a pixieish appearance. At the behest of FIFA, which has shown an extraordinary willingness to change the rules of a 19th-century sport it governs but did not invent, the game of two halves is now one of four quarters. The Swiss-based administrators say the new breaks (also known as “Powerade Hydration Breaks”) are necessitated by the summer heat. Fans mutter that the stoppages allow television stations to show more advertisements.
Perhaps the water breaks are a sly act of corporate charity. Though could there be a needier recipient? Fox, which holds the rights to air the competition in America, has liberally packed the short breaks with adverts, most of which appear to star Sir David Beckham. Its share price, after rallying last year, has stumbled. Other channels have seen better days. In France games are being broadcast by M6 (whose share price peaked in 2000); in Britain half are on ITV (2015); and many Spanish-speakers in America are watching them on Comcast’s Telemundo (2021). A tournament with many more games (104, up from 64 last time) ought to mean much more drinking. Yet brewers, too, are struggling. The wave of temperance sweeping young people in rich countries is the industry’s biggest problem. The World Cup might be the perfect antidote to this excessive prudence were not the England squad, historically known for its talented boozers, so keen to encourage it. Players this year can be spotted wearing a Whoop, a wrist-borne body-tracking device favoured by the over-thinking and the under-drunk. Harry Kane, the team’s captain, advertises Oura rings, another popular piece of neurotic jewellery. Some brewers still consider the tournament a Hail Mary. The world’s biggest expects the volume of beer sold this year to rise by between 0.2% and 0.3% because of it. American brewers will benefit from hosting the tournament. Though according to analysts at Morgan Stanley, how much is eventually drunk depends much more on which teams progress in the competition. Viewed this way, knockout games are also fixtures between the participating countries’ favourite beers. (Unexpected exits, though, can lead to massive unsold inventories, as they did when England crashed out in 2006 and 2010.) A similar logic applies to the gambling industry: the more exciting the tournament becomes, the more money betting firms make. Investors hate them, too. According to Deutsche Bank, Flutter and DraftKings, two giants of the industry, can expect a record of around $2.4bn to be bet by their customers in America. Their share prices have fallen by a half and a fifth respectively this year. That said, unlike their cousins in the booze business, they have only themselves to blame for the existential threat they face from prediction markets.