Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Demand explodes when barriers disappear
Smartphones
Smartphones existed ten years before the iPhone. They were clunky, had no touchscreen, had no wireless data system to run on, and cost $500 or $600. Then Steve Jobs got the price to $200, AT&T had a 3G network, and the touchscreen was so easy your grandmother could use it. Apple also built an ecosystem around it and made it simple.
Electric vehicles
Electric vehicles followed the same pattern. The price was too high until Elon Musk got it to $40,000. Range anxiety lingered until he got the range to 300 miles. The supply chain was finally in place to churn out millions of cars.
The internet and AI
The internet was out 20 years before Netscape, and AI sat hidden inside companies until ChatGPT took it public. When the barriers come down, everybody in the world knows they need the product right away, a tornado of demand.
Why did early smartphones fail to catch on?
IBM's Simon, sold in 1994, combined a phone, calendar, and email in one device with a touchscreen. It cost $899 with a service contract, had a battery that lasted about an hour of use, and ran on cellular networks built for voice calls. It sold only around 50,000 units. Later devices like the BlackBerry added keyboards and email, but they still had no fast wireless data.
What made the iPhone's touchscreen different?
Earlier touchscreens were mostly resistive, which sensed pressure and usually needed a stylus. The iPhone used a capacitive screen that read the electrical charge of a fingertip and could track several fingers at once. That made pinching and swiping possible. Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007.
Why did range anxiety hold back electric cars?
The Nissan Leaf, which went on sale in 2010, had an EPA-rated range of 73 miles. Charging stations were sparse, and a charge took far longer than filling a tank. A driver who could not finish a long trip had few options. The Tesla Model S arrived in 2012 with ratings up to 265 miles.
Why did the web take off in 1995?
Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web at CERN in 1989, and the Mosaic browser in 1993 put pictures and links in a graphical window. Netscape turned that into a commercial product in 1994. Its stock offering in August 1995 more than doubled in price on the first day of trading. Companies and consumers began putting up websites in large numbers shortly after.
How fast did ChatGPT reach users?
OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. A UBS analysis reported that it reached an estimated 100 million monthly active users in January 2023. The analysts called it the fastest-growing consumer application on record up to that point. TikTok had taken about nine months to reach that figure.
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