Mobile was a platform shift — a paradigm shift in how the Internet worked. It increased scale and consumer sophistication, making applications 10x easier to use. Unlike desktop computers, phones were… personal. You could take them anywhere, access them without friction, and do just about anything: make a call, take a photo, find a location, submit... See more

Eventually Bill realized that feature wars were stupid, made Internet Explorer the free, default browser for all Windows users, and won the market. Thus, a lesson was learned: when apps compete with the platforms they live on, the platform usually wins.

Most recently, I have been comparing the current AI frenzy to previous platform shifts and their aftermaths. For example, do you remember the explosion of applications in the early days of the iPhone? There were hundreds of apps that unleashed all sorts of superpowers, and then entire cohorts of these startups got destroyed every year at the... See more