Originally posted as a Twitter thread on November 10, 2025
The platform (almost always) wins
The spreadsheet was invented in 1979 by VisiCalc. VisiCalc lost 50% marketshare within 4 years to Lotus, and Microsoft obliterated Lotus within 15 years.
These “creative destruction” cycles used to take decades. With AI, they can take…months?
Cloud and mobile made distribution almost instantaneous, and AI makes the creation of software faster than ever in history.
Which is why moats really do matter, and why systems of record rule supreme. The good news is that there are new systems of record just waiting to be built…for industries that just never had them before.