The IT Era and the Internet Revolution

Yahoo and AOL are already has-beens. They operate under the old rules. They control content and distribution and think they can own customers, relationships, and attention. They create destinations and have the hubris to think customers should come to them. They spend a huge portion of their revenue on marketing to get those people there and work h... See more

The web’s first era was about information flowing freely—think Google giving you access to the world’s knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era. The second era was the social web—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. People began to create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active partic... See more

This point cannot be emphasized enough: the Internet is the single most disruptive1 force of our lifetimes because it does not evolve existing ways of doing things, but completely smashes the assumptions underlying them — assumptions we often didn’t even realize existed.