Pitfalls Of Linear Thinking

I took Om's advice and went straight to Cringely's site to read his  commentary on the inflection point.

Cringely's Jeffrey Archer style storytelling makes for a fascinating read. If you were the one who  just landed in this world and read Cringely's post then you would go straight to stock market and buy as much GOOG, YHOO and MSFT as you can. Fascinating post no doubt.

There is one problem with his analysis, he is assuming that rest of the world is stupid and sitting in the spectator's gallery.  That's not the reality anymore. We are together  in this theater and for once there are no spectators - yes  including customer - Think about all the user-generated content movement.  This time it will be hard for any company to own the segment for a longer duration. Reason being that if unchecked it's extremely easy to own the segment. Internet efficiency comes into play here.

Inflection point usually generates a monopoly, I still don't see where is this monopoly coming from?

If Google takes over the content distribution world then Cisco's revenue gets hurt. If Microsoft stabs it's OEM partner on their back then Intel comes out as a looser. There are many big companies who have the resources and intellectual chops to derail these inflection point champions ! What about HP, Oracle, Big telecom equipment suppliers. They have to be dumb not to react to these moves.

Post is insightful in a way that we should be aware of these possibilities (specially creepy Web Accelerator designs by Google).