Reflection: platform shifts in tech are slow, slow... then fast. Similar to products that are in pursuit of that elusive PMF, new platforms tend to percolate in isolation, iteration, early adoption and general skepticism for a long time. Until the proof is finally in the pudding, and the market is ready to embrace them. Platform Market Fit - so to speak.

Contrary to what folks might believe, the eventual inflection point is often less about the speed of technological progress alone. Rather, it is tied to the emergence of patterns of use cases that are valuable enough, intuitive enough and novel enough for the platform to make sense and break through. For people to say... "why would we do this any other way?" For both end users and the technologists to understand that there's a dense forrest in front of them, not just a handful of interesting trees.

From personal computing to web & mobile, to social, to cloud and so on. This pattern has held true many times over. The inverse of this pattern is also true. Consider so many "would-be" platform shifts that haven't materialized at least yet: crypto, VR/AR, Internet of Things, etc. For these technologies, we have yet to see any real patterns of use cases that are all valuable, intuitive and novel.

When we talk about GenAI.. and perhaps broadly "intelligence" as the next platform shift in tech... we are certainly seeing some hints of patterns emerging. For now, these signs and patterns are more obvious to us, the technologists. And not obvious or known to the vast majority of end users. Is 2025 the year where that inflection point occurs for them? I can certainly see it being possible, heck, maybe even probable. But I am holding off from saying it is inevitable. This probably depends on how well we - the builders - understand the actual needs and psychology of our users. It will be exciting nonetheless.

-- Waqas https://x.com/vixsheikh https://substack.com/@waqassheikh