Businesses, like buildings, require a foundation. For a building, stone and thick concrete are proven stable foundations. In business, any item that helps and holds high volumes of people with decreasing noticeable pain. Examples of this are, telephone infrastructure, powerthat people funnel into are stable foundations. Examples of this are telephone, power, water, and rail networks.
Networks like telephone or rail have become invisible to the everyday user, we interact with the systems built on top of them. For telephone a basic example of this progression is telephone line > internet > network servers > Facebook > Local Marketplace. In this flow most users connect to Facebook > Marketplace and the lower, foundational, layers of the stack are invisible. Think about those lower layers, they operate 24/7 with extremely high confidence of longevity because of the number and volume of uses above them. That level of operation is business goal and benchmark I use when looking at technology.
We can use the progression of foundational technologies—such as the progression from phone lines, to the internet, to connected servers, and eventually to platforms like Facebook—provides a framework for assessment. Several questions arise when judging the potential and effectiveness of a new technology: How many people can this technology support? How challenging is it to acquire new users? What is the duration of each user’s engagement on the platform (time spent)? Does the platform encourage users to invite others (virality)? And, how often do users return to the platform (user retention)?
By addressing these questions, we can better understand the potential impact and longevity of new technologies.
Stay tuned for more on this topic. We will use this model to review modern technology in AI.
Cheers,
Nigel A.