The power of patterns
Technology is a constantly evolving landscape (there’s some deep insight for ya - lol). Change is hard for anyone to process, almost by definition - new things to learn, new affordances, new patterns. It’s extra hard for those of us in the field of technology, because it’s our job to make sense of these new capabilities before everyone else does.
So one of the things we tend to do is rely on past patterns. There’s no shame in that - often that’s a good shortcut and heuristic for making sense of a totally new domain. But it’s important to realize that that kind of pattern matching is almost never the whole picture - we have to dig deeper.
Long ago, at the start of the dot com boom, the desktop companies were struggling to make sense of the internet, and what they should do with it. They didn’t really have new patterns or models to attach to, so at first, they just did what they knew, but in the direction of the new space - I built and sold a product to Claris, for example, that was a desktop app for building web pages. It quickly became clear that, though this was useful, it wasn’t where most of the value really was.
Similar with domains - there was quite an early land rush for them, and perhaps some of the early ones were worth it. But “Google.com”, “Facebook.com” and “Amazon.com” all wound up being much more valuable than “search.com”, “social.com” and “shopping.com”. The real value was in the new capabilities and the new kinds of business that could enable, not in “owning” “real-estate” - a very pre-internet perspective on scarcity.
I was thinking about this this week, seeing some announcements about crypto cloud and related API products. These are perfectly fine things to be building, and will likely be good businesses. But, if there is real value in crypto (I’m still very much a skeptic of a lot of it), it’s not likely to be in patterns like that that are easy to understand. It will look more like Google or Amazon - someone who finds a real pain point that billions of people have, and solves it well (and probably invents a new model along the way for the next set of innovators to imitate). (this is actually why I’m a skeptic - I see some new value, but not much that’s not self-contained, and no markets yet that seem really big).
Challenge yourself to think beyond the models you’re familiar with and look at new capabilities instead…