Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?

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

In the mobile revolution, much of the value of mobile was captured by incumbents. For example, while many startups tried to build “mobile CRM”, the winners were existing CRM companies who added a mobile app. Salesforce was not displaced by mobile, it added a mobile app. Similarly, Gmail, Microsoft Office etc were not displaced by mobile, they added... See more

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them. There’s an old saying that the first ... See more

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 Worldw... See more