The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

In the last wave, things dematerialized; goods became services. You don’t buy software or music on CDs anymore; it’s streamed. You just expect antivirus and security software as a by-product of using Google or Apple. Products break, get obsolete. Services less so. They are seamless and easy to use. For their part, companies are eager for you to subscribe to their software ecosystems; regular payments are alluring. All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Apple has the App Store, despite primarily selling devices, and Amazon, while operating as the world’s biggest retailer of physical goods, also provides e-commerce services to merchants and TV streaming to individuals, and hosts a good chunk of the internet on its cloud offering, Amazon Web Services. Everywhere you look, technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer by providing continuous consumption services rather than traditional buy-once products. Whether it’s services like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb, or open publishing platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the drift of mega-businesses is toward not participating in the market but being the market, not making the product but operating the service.

Dematerialized Dominance: When Platforms Become the Market