S-Curves

The fundamental pattern of technology adoption: a slow, halting start, followed by explosive growth, then a plateau into maturity and stability. S-curves always follow S-curves — as one technology platform matures, the next one begins its slow climb, resetting the landscape for everyone.

Where it comes from

Benedict Evans, in his talk on 10-year futures vs. what's happening now (consume/highlights/10-year-futures-vs-whats-happening-now), uses the S-curve as the central organizing framework for understanding technology waves across decades. > “What you see with all of these curves is that they start slowly and then they reach a point that they explode and then they kind of slow down again and get a bit boring.” (~0:40)

How it works

PC internet → Mobile internet
Mobile phones → Smartphones
Now: smartphones → AI, autonomy, mixed reality, crypto

The insight

The most important strategic question is not whether today's platforms are saturated, but what the next S-curves will be. When people say “innovation is dead,” it's always because they're looking at the plateau of one curve rather than the slow beginnings of the next.

Where it is argued

2 notes

01Investing Through Technology CyclesTechnology adoption follows S-curves: slow start, explosive growth, maturity 02AI Going VerticalDianne Penn, President of Product at Anthropic, joined the company in 2023 as its first technical product manager when the product team was just five engineers. In the three years since, she has helped ship every Anthropic model from Claude 2 through Fable, and incubated transformative products like Claude Code, MCP, Skills, Claude Design, and core capabilities like computer use, tool use, and reasoning. Her conversation with Lenny Rachitsky traces Anthropic's improbable rise from an underdog lab to a company reportedly generating $50 billion in annual revenue — and what it means for how product management, research, and work itself are being reinvented.