The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small

CHAPTER 13 The 3-phase shift: a closer look at the web

In hindsight it’s always easier to find the connections that made something possible. The causes are often more evident and the shift can be segmented into easily definable parts when we pay attention to what’s been happening. The technology revolution has had a clear trajectory. When we view the two phases we’ve already been through, we’ll see that the third phase is quite predictable. Not predictable in terms of who will win in the new market segment, but predictable in terms of where the technology itself will go.

The phases

We’ve already lived through two distinct phases of the web from a commercial and a human perspective. The first was the connection of infrastructure and the second was the connection of people. But now, we’re entering a third, and most interesting, phase: the web of things. The web of things can be defined as a world where the web becomes so omnipresent that it becomes mostly invisible. It will be a world where everything and everyone is augmented via technology and our connection to both computing power and the network itself. You may be asking why anyone would want this and how it could relate to business, but before we do that, it’s worth considering how we got here as this will uncover why the web of things is a natural evolution.

Phase 1: connecting machines

The first phase of the web was the connection of machines. This takes us all the way back to the 1960s when experiments in data transfer ...