The interesting thing to me is is that each of these inflection points, the industry had a set of 2-3 possible &quot;next big things&quot;, and then <i>none</i> of them happened and the actual next big thing was something different.<p>In the early 90s, the next big thing was WebTV, VR, or PDAs.  Instead, we got the WWW.<p>Post dot-com crash, the next big thing was P2P, enterprise software, and the semantic web.  Instead, we got social networking.<p>In 2008, the next big thing was casual games, (micro)blogs, and embeddable widgets.  Instead we got mobile and the sharing economy.<p>Now, the next big thing is wearables, IoT, or AI.  And who knows what we&#x27;re going to get?<p>Looking at the patterns, it looks like the mistake most people make is to extrapolate the <i>last</i> big thing into the next, not being willing to make a big enough conceptual jump.  So enterprise software, the semantic web, and P2P are all offshoots of the WWW and all enjoyed some modest success, but a <i>different</i> offshoot of the WWW (social) connected it to a different area of peoples&#x27; lives.  Casual games, microblogs, and embeddable widgets are all offshoots of social, but a <i>different</i> offshoot of these social changes was enabled by mobile, which enabled totally different ways of interacting.