The Third Wave

The Third Wave lays out the history of the internet and how it’s about to permeate everything in our lives, as well as what it takes for entrepreneurs to make use of this mega-trend and thrive in an omni-connected, always-online world.

First, here’s a quick recap of the three waves of the Internet Age. The First Wave started in the 90s with the dawn of the internet.

What had begun as a project of the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1960s (a first network of fifteen computers hooked together via something called ARPANET) and slowly lead to standardized sets of protocols (called TCP/IP), finally came to a breakthrough at the Swiss CERN research facility in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee developed the tools of the internet trade: the first web browser (called WorldWideWeb), HTML and HTTP. From then on it was a lot of hard work on the part of AOL, IBM and a bunch of other companies to spread the hardware and technology, as well as convince people that the internet was useful.

Slowly seeping through to the general public after 1995, the Second Wave really hit in the early 2000s, when Google, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook started to change our daily lives. Smartphones then gave us access to the web everywhere and all the time, which brought us to the brink of the Third Wave.

This last wave will be shaped by the Internet of Things, in which connection is unlimited: cars, homes, cities, nature. Your couch will be able to talk to your bookshelf, your fridge to your grocery store, your car to the one driving next to you and the crop field to the harvester.

This changes everything. The possibilities will be endless. Which means a lot of old solutions will become obsolete – and that’s okay. In fact, if you’re too busy trying to preserve the status quo, you’ll go down right with it. Take John Deere, for example. For over 20 years they’ve worked on self-steering tractors and harvesters using GPS and satellite technology. It’s not uncommon for big land and farming machines to navigate all on their own, the farmer sitting at home, only checking in occasionally via a handheld device. Sounds a lot like self-driving cars, huh? Imagine how far we’d be down that road if John Deere had licensed and sold its technology years ago, instead of waiting for Google, Apple and Tesla to take that cake from them. But self-disruption is hard to accept and even harder to embrace. It wasn’t easy for Apple to say goodbye to the success of the iPod, but the iPhone was the right next step. Same with the iPad and Macbooks. Just like Amazon…