All technology goes through two somewhat independent cycles, continuously: 1) The bloat cycle 2) The disruption cycle The bloat cycle is where you have a “pl

All technology goes through two somewhat independent cycles, continuously: 1) The bloat cycle 2) The disruption cycle The bloat cycle is where you have a “platform” that does more and more until it has a lot of features that most users don’t need. Eventually the cost of supporting those random features gets too high and there is pressure on people to hack together an alternative micro-platform that does some arbitrary subset of things. If that subset is actually a superset of “must-have features” for a large number of users the micro-platform becomes a new platform and the cycle repeats. The disruption cycle is when there is a singular feature that is prohibitive to add to the framework, because of past decisions. Businesses working on the platform will just work around the hole, or fill the hole in a hacky way. This creates pressure for someone to create a new platform that solves that one unsolved problem. It can leave many solved problems unsolved and still ascend to dominance under conditions famously described in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. This would be something like “multiple users work on the same surface” or “works the same-ish on literally all the OS’es” features of the web. These cycles might seem pointless, but they’re not because you end up in a different place than where you started. You get some fundamental simplifications and new features each time you go around. Ideally as a user you want to time your entry into the cycle so you don’t have to deal with the regression phase.