一本值得IT从业者一读的书：The Third Wave

YugaYuga

The Third Wave : An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future
Author: Steve Case, 2016

https://www.amazon.com/Third-Wav ... uture/dp/150113258X

[An excerpt from the PREFACE]
…
In the more than thirty years since the birth of America Online, the Third Wave that Toffler predicted has indeed come to pass. I was lucky to have been there at the beginning, and luckier still to have been a part of it ever since.
The Internet age has progressed at a remarkable pace since those early days. It has had several phases of evolution, too – its very own Tofferesque waves.

The First Wave of the Internet was all about building the infrastructure and foundation for an online world. These were the companies – Cisco Systems, Sprint, HP, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, AOL – that were working on the hardware, software, and networks that would make it possible to connect people to the Internet, and to one another. Together, we were building the on-ramps to the information superhighway. (Remember that term?)

Back then, our band of online pioneers had to fight for everything. We had to fight to reduce the cost of getting connected, as telephone networks were typically charging $10 per hour to get online, making it unaffordable for most. We had to beg PC manufacturers to consider shipping their computers with built-in modems. At the time, only hobbyists were online, and most PC executives couldn’t fathom why any normal person would ever need a modem.

In the early days of AOL, so much of our job was just explaining what the Internet was, how it worked, and why anyone would want to use it. I remember doing an interview in 1995 on PBS where I was asked, “Why do people need this?” This question was still an open one at the time. And that was a decade after got started.

Getting people online gave the next generation of innovators a new canvas and new paint. Great minds started considering the vast applications of global connectivity. They tinkered and fiddled, then chased ideas and started companies. (One of our users got his start in coding by hacking AIM, or AOL Instant Messenger, communications software. His name was Mark Zuckerberg.)

The Second Wave of the Internet began at the turn of the twenty-first century, just in time to inflate the dot-com bubble and let it burst – the Internet’s first real extinction event. A lot of entrepreneurs and investors lost fortunes. But those who survived were primed to lead the next ear of Internet innovation.

The Second Wave was about building on top of the Internet. Search engines like Google made it easier to explore the sheer volume of information available on the web. Amazon and eBay turned their corner of the Internet into one-stop shop. It was during the Second Wave that social networking came of age, too. Where Google sought to organise the Internet’s information, social networks let us organise ourselves - and attracted a billion users. And it was during the Second Wave that Apple introduced the iPhone, Google introduced Android, and a mobile movement was born. This convergence supercharged the Second Wave, as smartphones and tablets became the engines of the new Internet, creating an economy that would populate the world with millions of mobile applications.

The Second Wave has been largely defined by software as a service – social apps like Twitter and Instagram that make sharing ideas and photos easier, or traffic apps like Waze, which weren’t practical without ubiquitous mobile connectivity. And while the most successful of these companies al dealt with unique obstacles to climb to the pole position, they also have a great deal in common. First, their products are, practically speaking, infinitely scalable. Coping with new users is usually as simple as adding more server capacity and hiring more engineers. And second, the products themselves – the apps – tend to be infinitely replicable. Nothing has to be manufactured.

Today, the Second Wave is starting to give way to something new. Decades from now, when historians write the story of technological evolution, they will argue that the moment the Internet became a ubiquitous force in the world was when we started integrating it into everything we did. This moment is the beginning of the Third Wave.

The Third Wave is the ear when the Internet stops belonging to Internet companies. It is the ear in which products will require the Internet, even if the Internet doesn’t define them. It is the era when the term “Internet-enabled” will start sound as ludicrous as the term “electricity-enabled,” as if either were notable differentiators.  It is the era when the concept of the Internet of Things – of adding connected sensors to products – will be viewed as too limiting, because we’ll realize that what’s emerging is the much broader Internet of Everything.

The entrepreneurs of this era are going to challenge the biggest industries in the world, and those most affect our daily lives. They will reimagine our healthcare system and retool our education system. They will create products and services that make our food safer and our commute to work easier.

But if this new generation of entrepreneurs is to succeed, the playbook from the Second Wave won’t do.

Third Wave company creation stories are less likely to begin with dorm-inspired apps that go viral, as they often did in the Second Wave. Third Wave entrepreneurs will need to build partnerships across sectors in a way that Second Wave companies never had to. They will need to navigate a policy landscape that most Second Wave companies could ignore. And they will need to do it all in a space where barriers to entry – even for a worthy idea – are far greater than anything experienced in the Second Wave.

The playbook they need, indeed, is the one that worked during the First Wave, when the Internet was still young and scepticism was still high; when the barriers to entry were enormous, and when partnerships were a necessity to reaching your customers; when the regulatory system was coming to grips with a new reality and struggling to figure out the appropriate path forward.

I am writing this book today because we are living at a pivotal point in history, and I want to offer whatever perspective I can to ensure a bright future. I am writing this because the history of the First Wave has become increasingly important as a way to think about this future – how we plan for it, adapt to it, and seize upon its opportunity. And yet much of that story, including my own, remains untold.
…

liquidator

看不懂啊。

flypast

多谢分享

sydney668

第三次浪潮曾经在80年代风行中国。

wunova

不错的推荐

Helena-Lee

Good book, good taste

5.5

楼主是自己打的字吗？
怎么都是耳朵 耳朵:)