We’ve reached peak attention on the internet. As you can see from the graph below, the time spent online is not significantly growing anymore.

The growth of the internet has generated 4 champions (Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon) who together dominate for the most part how you spent your time online, where you do your shopping and how you get online.

Comscore’s Mobile App Report 2017 underlines this, they found that most of all our time we spent only on 10 apps.

And those apps are:

These companies are now at their peak and they have the momentum to buy, absorb or change their tactics to fend off any competitor. The Facecbook / Snapchat battle is a great example of that. Facebook just absorbs everything which makes Snapchat unique. It might not capture all the audience away from Snapchat, but just enough to defend their position.

Distribution on the internet is becoming harder & expensive

VCs love to say that it became much cheaper to start a company and in many ways this still holds true today. Except it became more expensive and harder to distribute your product – being it a service, software or product – and reach your audience.

It is more expensive because today you need a website and 2 mobile apps instead of just a website.

Harder because by default you don’t have easy access to your audience anymore. The audience does not live on the web anymore. They live in Facebook, app stores, search engines, Amazon and Netflix. The attention of the average internet user is fully engaged and it has become virtually impossible to steal a bit of that attention away without smart, engaging and costly marketing.

You used to be able to start a company by building a site and service and launching it. You could market it to a few key users and find a few journalists to write about it. Today that is not enough, you get quickly buried because we reached peak attention.

I would argue that it is much cheaper to scale your company nowadays – not necessarily to start one.

I don’t expect that AI, machine learning, AR or VR will not significantly change the landscape. GAFA is well situated to absorb and embrace those new technologies. They’ll lead to new opportunities but companies need to battle the same attention problem like any other company launching a new product or service on the internet.

It’s reasonable to assume that only a major new platform or major platform shift can threaten their position and generate a new set of GAFA companies.

The big promise of web 2.0 was that eventually all applications would run inside a web browser and that native apps would go away. This was in early 2000s. We’ve come a long way since then but native apps have not gone away – even by a long shot. Especially the birth and rise of mobile threw a wrench in this vision, but there are some early signs on the horizon this is going to change.

Apps are winning! No wait! The browser is winning! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/lpazY5EBXG

— Koen Bok (@koenbok) January 3, 2017

The IOS and Android mobile platforms have been taking over the world. 51.3% of internet traffic originates from a mobile platform and the developing part of the world depends even more heavily on mobile platforms. But at the same time, mobile platforms have been killing the web. 60% of mobile usage is inside apps nowadays and it’s growing. Apps are different because they are built using lower level programming languages like Objective-C (IOS) and Java (Android). Because of their low-level nature, they’re more costly to develop for plus two different versions need to be maintained to support both platforms. Luckily – you could argue because of this – we only ended up with two mobile platforms.

The reason the web took off the way it did was because it could be accessed from any device and OS. A web browser was enough. This allowed for websites to quickly scale because the distribution via web was easy, fast and enormous.

But the web – an open platform governed by open standard bodies – was not ready to run on underpowered mobile platforms. The same applied to mobile networks at the time. When the iPhone came out in 2007, it supported AT&Ts 2G EDGE network with a maximum transfer rate of 200kbps. The first iPhone had a battery-friendly downclocked Samsung ARM CPU which was 100x slower than today’s iPhone 7 and IOS Safari’s web performance increased by 200x. Not only the mobile hardware improved significantly over time, but also the mobile networks are significantly faster to the point that in many places of the world there’s no significant speed difference between fixed and wireless connections.

In the early years of the iPhone, Steve Jobs was bullish on the future of the web evidenced from his controversial Thoughts on Flash open letter to Adobe. Early on IOS browser Safari came with features out of the box to bring web sites into IOS by allowing them to run full-screen and give them a place on the home screen with an icon like any other (native) app. These features still exist today.

But Apple and the rest of the world quickly realized that to get the necessary performance, 3D acceleration, grant access to local features like the camera, GPS and storage, it was necessary to move to native apps. Apple introduced their IOS app store in 2008. Apple’s App Store is an enormous success and at the same time moved the focus away from the web as a viable app platform.

W3C, ECMA and others kept chugging along and kept moving the web standards forward. We are now at the 5th standard for HTML, 7th edition of the JS/ECMAScript standard, 4th level of CSS and version 2 of WebGL. Javascript was famously created in 10 days by Brendan Eich because Marc Andreessen wanted to augment the web by giving their browser some limited dynamic capabilities and it needed to be done before the Netscape 1.1 release. This happened in 1995.
The web has come a long way since then and now has 3D support, local storage, notifications and access to location services.

If we would imagine a world where a mobile computing devices has access to unlimited processing power, unlimited storage and unlimited network speeds, there is certain a great case to be made that the web will come back as the platform for apps. As shown earlier, we are moving towards a world like where the resource constraints – which made native applications become the default choice – are no longer an issue.

It stands to reason that the web will become as prevalent as it has become on the desktop and arguable even bigger than it is today. In 2009 Apache Cordova – formerly known as NItobi and PhoneGap – was born. Cordova was one of the first tries to work towards unifying mobile platforms using the web, but is no longer alone in morphing the web into native app development. In 2013, the Ionic and Electron frameworks came to life. All of these open source projects have the same goal which is to marry web standards (JS, CSS, HTML, WebGL) with native underlying platforms breaking free from the constraints of the generic web browser. They tie web technologies with a native experience on each supported platform while allowing the same application without modification live on both platforms.

The benefits are clear. A single app which can run on any platform with little to no modifications built using a higher level programming language is going to make it cheaper, faster and easier to build and distribute new apps.

The problem of native app development is exacerbated by the large number of display sizes in the market today. Apple’s IOS lineup from iPhone SE through iPad Pro there are 6 different display sizes to support. Android is in a similar situation. The larger tablets move into desktop territory.

Talking about desktop territory, Google’s strategy to bring Android to ChromeOS laptop feels like an impatient move to make that computing platform more relevant. In many ways ChromeOS was meant to do the same by graduating web applications to become standalone applications on a computing platform. Much of the strategy to bring Android applications to ChromeOS stems from the positioning of Chromebooks as lower-end alternatives to their Windows and MacOS counterparts. It’s unclear to me if that was a conscious decision by Google or the market – namely OEMs designing and manufacturing Chromebooks – decided to position chromebooks that way. Though Google has been very successful in marketing their Chromebooks in the education market.

Below the surface there’s an additional opportunity. When it becomes easier to develop for multiple platforms simultaneously, it also creates opportunities for new platforms to emerge. For instance, Microsoft has been struggling to get a foothold in the mobile market and much of that can be attributed to their slow response to the mobile computing platform. When they were moving, it was already too late. The native app ecosystem proved an enormous hurdle to cross and app developers were not waiting to support another platform. But there’s a possible future where that hurdle is going away and that is an enormous opportunity for Microsoft and others.

There’s a fair chance that we look back on the era of the native mobile apps as abomination of the norm.

Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (GAFA) are now the most valuable and successful companies in the world. This also means that they’re maturing rapidly and this means the platforms they ride on are mature quickly as well. These companies are carrying boatloads of money which give them the power of money to compete against any new (potential) threat quickly. A good example is Google Home and the subsequent push by Google to bring this product to as many consumers as fast possible. It is competing against the highly successful Amazon Echo family of products. 

Another example is the introduction of “snapchat” features into the different properties of Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp reached 200M DAUs within months – just compare that to Snapchat’s 160M DAUs on IPO which took them years to get to that point.

So strictly speaking any new development on the internet or mobile will either be quickly bought up or copied by these companies. And this will make it much harder to launch and grow a successful competing company on these platforms.

History also tells us that when companies reach this height and as their platforms further mature, new platforms and opportunities will arise. And interesting enough these companies will not be able to compete or turn around their business to take full advantage of this. This might sound inconceivable today, but let’s look at these two examples. 

First, there’s Walmart, the biggest retailer in the world, but in online retail they’re irrelevant. You’d think that a company with the resources and knowledge of retail would be able to compete and keep up with online retail competitors. But they are not. Of course, they won’t go away, but they will not become the number one online retailer anymore. 

The same can be said about Microsoft. They completely missed the boat on the internet and mobile platforms until it was too late. You could even argue they missed the cloud platform as well. Same applies to Intel. Intel missed the boat on mobile as well. Together they were known as Wintel and they were the jewels of the nineties. Now, these companies have become irrelevant from a mindshare and technology direction perspective.

Before Wintel, there was IBM. IBM was the computing company of the 80s, but today they’re irrelevant.

Of course IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Walmart are still alive and generating sizable revenues. Irrelevancy does not mean bankruptcy – in many ways, these companies are too big to fail. But they’re on the infinite road of playing catch up in their respective markets.

This brings me to my point that the hegemony of GAFA will go away as well. You already see some early signs of this in both Google and Apple. Google spends an extraordinary amount of money ($15B in 2016) on R&D but no new platform has emerged from it yet. Same applies to Apple. Their biggest product launches in the last 5 years were just accessories – watch and AirPods – and not platforms. They’ll never be able to grow into revenue streams similar to iPhone or Macbooks.

Taken together, you could come to the conclusion that we’re on the brink of a new major platform to emerge. Investment dollars and ideas are turning away from more traditional investments in internet services and mobile towards other platforms. At this point, it is impossible to say what these new platforms will be. It is pretty certain that they will emerge from all the attention towards blockchains, machine learning/AI and augmented reality/virtual reality. None of these technologies is a platform but you can bet on it that it will be enabled by one or more of them.

Platforms emerge when there is a technology breakthrough which makes it possible to bring technology to form factors or places which were previously impossible. 

Electric autonomous vehicles are way on top of my list. It will be as disruptive as the internet. Cities will change; no need for parking lots, people can live further out in suburbia. Car-ownership will change, there might not even be a need to own a car anymore. This will impact car dealerships and car manufacturers. We might only end up with a few of manufacturers and reach complete commoditization of car manufacturing. There will be no further need of gas stations. Cars are probably maintained by large corporations running major fleets of autonomous vehicles. The car wash will go away. There is no longer need for the DMV and maybe policing of traffic is a thing of the past. Tax revenue streams need to be readjusted.

A little further out but as fundamental as the computer processor or the internet, I would bet on either power consumption or power storage technology. The biggest problem holding back many potential applications, form factors, and new technology is power consumption and power storage. Any new technology which can decrease power consumption or increase power storage densities by 100x is going to change the world fundamentally.

It is not limited to power consumption or power storage. The new technology can also change the paradigm on how devices work. For instance, power could be transmitted wirelessly. Or the technology can offer a way to offload 99% of processing to a different device while offering a full-fledged platform performance.

When that happens it is pretty obvious what is going to happen. History is telling us that again. Typically an emergence of a new technology is unbundling existing platforms and then bundles it again into the new platform. For instance, the internet unbundled many things like the cable subscription, magazine subscriptions, music distribution, phone subscriptions and this is still going on. Currently, a lot of offerings of the banking industry is being unbundled like debit cards, loans, mortgages, and insurance. But at the same time, you see new bundles appear. GAFA is a good example of this. They bundle and protect their own platforms. The openness of the web has been replaced with proprietary – and much less open – platforms like IOS and Android. The mobile phone bundles everything like your wallet, camera and must player. Facebook is pulling everyone into their walled garden much like AOL did at the time with their own version of the web.

And this is my second major observation for the next platform which is openness. All the major platform shifts were twofold. First, the emergence of new technology which allowed new form factors, services or applications not previously possible before. And second, the emergence of an open standard to make us of the new platform. It is essential to level the playing field for a new technology to become successful. For instance, if the new technology would be of the nature of wireless power transmission, it would only start to take off when the platform or protocol is open.

When this all happens the whole cycle will start over again.

Copy. Download. Live Forever.

People who are close to me know I am a Star Trek fan. I also have a long time wish to go to space — maybe some day. In my home, I have a iPad dedicated to the HD Earth Viewing Experiment on UStream which sends out a constant video feed of three cameras attached to the international space station ISS.

But secretly I do not believe in a Star Trekian future. Seriously I do not think it is a plausible future that we space travel as humans beyond our solar system. I think even Mars is quite a stretch.

Instead I think it makes much more sense to download our human brain into a computer and send that computer instead. Just imagine there is no need for food, water or other supplies + equipment necessary to make those journeys. It even does not matter so much how long the journey will take.

Computing power is progressing nicely and IBM already designed a computer to simulate a mouse brain. In another decade or so and we will see computers who are capable of emulating a human brain. Now at that point we can program an artificial intelligence which is indistinguishable for a human. We can program the computer anyway we like, but why not model it by copying actual humans? You might think I am insane, but it would make so much more sense to me.

You always end up with less when working at an early-stage startup

People working in startups are all so familiar with the concept of giving away responsibilities. Whenever you start in a startup, you can count on the fact that you’re role is changing all the time. Regardless of whether responsibilities shift downwards or sideways, they are inevitable moving somewhere.

Your startup starts out with 3–4 people who do everything. Slowly, new people are added, roles are carved out, and responsibilities are limited. With each new influx of people these roles are reevaluated and the same ritual starts again.

The same applies as the company grows your personal capabilities are constantly evaluated. Your position within the company is constantly shifting and changing. The company often grows faster than your personal growth can keep up with. Or your role is carved up in 2 or 3 different roles and you have to choose between them.

All these things have nothing to do with failure or underperformance. It is about making the company grow as fast as possible while keeping everything manageable. But I can tell from experience it is sometimes hard to let go. Even it is going downwards instead of sideways. You might be end-responsible, but someone else is actually executing it. It is not the same.

It is for this reason that startups are not for everyone. You need to adapt and be comfortable with adapting. You have to embrace change and you need to be comfortable with finding your own limitations. But more so, nothing better to run into this because of the company you work is successful and growing up. On the end of the day, there is nothing more satisfying than bringing something to the world which is self-sustaining and impacting the world in its own way.

Artificial intelligence was one of the first buzzwords I can remember from the previous century. It promised a future with intelligent computers or devices which could understand you and act autonomously.

Up until now we still do not use AI-enabled devices in our daily life. Why is that?

Our brain has 10 billion brain cells. Each brain cell has 10.000 connections to other brain cells. Neurons activate pathways to brain cells. The activation of brain cells along those path pass along the message of the neuron to other brain cells. Some pathways end and the message is not forwarded. The combination of brain cells and pathways between brain cells is how the brain processes and stores information.

To make AI happen we should be at least be able to mimic the brain cells and pathways functions. There are two options available; hardware and software emulation.

You could compare the brain (without memory) with a CPU. Current top-of-the-line computer processors contain 2–3 billion transistors. That comes close but each transistor has only a few pathways and is in the end only a transistor. If you would emulate the pathways the current CPU need to contain at least 50.000 more transistors than they today. Based on the Moore’s law (CPU transistor count doubles every 2 years) we can have to wait until 2025 to get to this point.

From a memory perspective you need to store the values of each of the pathways of the brain cells. This would require 10B * 10k * 1 byte = ~90TB of data. The biggest individual memory units currently available are 12GB. Applying the law of Moore again and we reach 90TB memory units in 2023.

With current technology we are able to emulate the brain function of an insect. Hence you see all those insect-like autonomous robots.

Based on these calculations it looks major progress can be made in AI in 15 years from now because the necessary computer hardware is available to be able to emulate the brain functions. Of course emulation is only the first step. The emulated brain also needs to be programmed to work. Much like any brain is programmed before birth.