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Love this post (like I do pretty much all of Jason’s).
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This segues very nicely with a post I’ve been (slowly) writing about building products that are tailored to high-delta markets (as my friend Jeremy Kirshbaum likes to call them). That is, instead of bundling countries geographically and importing “one model to rule them all” from SV.
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There’s a lot of Brownian activity going on since we’ve come to the end of the mobile wave (hint: Apple and Google won) and we’re at the fold between two hills. The only thing certain is that the next big platform will either be built directly on (the sheer scale of) mobile (AI [ML], Messenger bots [NLP], or the intersection of many of those things), or take advantage of the fact that mobile smartphones parts are now cheaper (VR headsets, HMDs, Wearable tech, etc.) - economics of scale and all. I’m not a fan of what I call linear, incremental thinking. That is, taking things that exist right now, and using them to draw up models of what the future “will” look like. That’s because many things can happen in the next few years to completely change the landscape (aside: I think the future is made up of a clash of ideas, not extensions of existing ones).
From this article I (wrote and) linked to:
…is akin to going back in time to 2002 and showing someone an Xbox One console. They’d get super-excited about it and term it “futuristic”, but it does not paint a wholesome picture of what the future (today) looks like.
In all, I’m excited about the future and what that phrase turns out to mean in say…10 years. Messenger bots may be it (because Africans largely already drink the web through a straw - WhatsApp, Facebook, Nairaland, and Linda Ikeji’s comments section are all social networks, e-commerce sites, Wikipedias, etc.), or they may not.
I’m sticking around to find out.