The AI Tidal Wave [Week #9-2025]
Back in 1995, as the commercial internet was still embryonic, Bill Gates sent a confidential note internally at Microsoft called The Internet Tidal Wave. Back then, a player like Netscape became the most popular browser, quickly eating up Internet traffic market shares, which raised a red flag at Microsoft; it was a wake-up call. Since then, through a bunch of boom and burst, the Internet has become the latest critical tech cycles of the last 30 years.
If Bill Gates had been around as a business executive, he might have called the piece The AI Tidal Wave. That’s where we are today! And yet, as I’ve explained in The "Horizontal Enabling Layer", the current AI paradigm might be fundamentally different from the web one. Thus, before I go to some interesting stuff this week, let me quickly step back to see how we got here.
The weekly newsletter is in the spirit of what it means to be a Business Engineer: We always want to ask three core questions:
What’s the shape of the underlying technology that connects the value prop to its product?
What’s the shape of the underlying business that connects the value prop to its distribution?
How does the business survive in the short term while it sticks to its long-term vision via transitional business modeling market dynamics?
These non-linear analyses aim to isolate the short-term buzz and noise, find the signal, and ensure you can reconcile the short with the long term!
