S-Curves Following S-Curves

Technology platforms don't emerge in isolation — they cascade. As one S-curve plateaus, the next is already in its slow-start phase. The PC internet was followed by the mobile internet. Mobile phones were followed by smartphones. And when a platform matures, innovation shifts from the platform itself to what gets built *on top* of it.

Where it comes from

Benedict Evans makes this the central historical pattern of his talk on 10-year futures (consume/highlights/10-year-futures-vs-whats-happening-now), tracing three generations of platform S-curves. > “What you see with all of these curves is that they start slowly and then they reach a point that they explode and then they kind of slow down again and get a bit boring. ... What we have are S-curves following S-curves. So most recently we had the PC internet which has been followed by the mobile internet.” (~0:40)

How it works

PC internet (~1.5 billion units)
Mobile phones (~5 billion units, connecting nearly everyone on earth)
Smartphones (~3 billion units, emerged out of the mobile phone S-curve)
Now: autonomy, mixed reality, crypto, AI are in their early phases
On PCs: we talked about search and social
On smartphones: ride-sharing, Instagram, Instacart, deliveries
“We talk about what you can build on top of the platform, not rather than the platform itself.” (~1:19)
“Innovation is dead and this is really boring and the new iPhone looks just like the last iPhone and what have you done for me lately.” (~1:24)
This complaint is itself a recurring pattern — Evans points to Marc Andreessen arriving in 1994 saying he'd “already missed the whole thing” right as the web was about to explode. (~1:36)

The insight

The strategic imperative is to run both conversations simultaneously: exploit the mature platform (what can be built on top?) while exploring the emerging ones (which S-curve will reset everything?). Companies that only ask the first question get disrupted. Companies that only ask the second fail to capture value from the present.

Where it is argued

2 notes

01Investing Through Technology CyclesHow platforms succeed each other as curves mature 02AI Going VerticalDianne Penn, President of Product at Anthropic, joined the company in 2023 as its first technical product manager when the product team was just five engineers. In the three years since, she has helped ship every Anthropic model from Claude 2 through Fable, and incubated transformative products like Claude Code, MCP, Skills, Claude Design, and core capabilities like computer use, tool use, and reasoning. Her conversation with Lenny Rachitsky traces Anthropic's improbable rise from an underdog lab to a company reportedly generating $50 billion in annual revenue — and what it means for how product management, research, and work itself are being reinvented.