The concept of a “platform” on the internet is a holdover from a time when computing and storage was expensive, bandwidth was scarce, and you needed to build economies of scale to make things like social networking viable.
We now live in a world where computing and storage are cheap, bandwidth is plentiful and the economies of scale for these things have overflown and the water of unutilized excess capacity is just pouring all over the ground.
Add the rise of artificial intelligence to the mix, and it’s really not that hard to see where things are going — a complete renegotiation of the fundamental assumptions of the human-computer interface, and ultimately the shape of the internet itself.
But if you’re still thinking about building a business atop the notions of what I call “platform thinking”, you’re going to get slaughtered in the next 5-10 years. This truly is a moment of all assumptions breaking down.
