Benedict Evans, continuing to expound on Machine Learning:
One of the recurring conversations in Silicon Valley is to wonder what the next ’S Curve’ is - we had PCs, then the internet, and then smartphones, but smartphones are boring and well-understood now, so what’s the next rocket ship? We often talk about machine learning and crypto here. But, I’d suggest we should actually look at another time series - over the past few decades we moved through databases, ‘productivity’, client-server, open-source, SaaS and Cloud. In parallel with new client platforms, we had new waves of architecture or development model, and that’s really a better way to look at machine learning - ML is the new SQL (and maybe crypto is in part the new open source). And so if you want to know ‘what’s our AI strategy?’ or ‘how do we choose an AI vendor?’, the answer is, well, how did you choose a cloud vendor or a SaaS Vendor, and how did you identify opportunities for databases?