AI Apps on your Phone? Visual Basic points the way

Windows 95 and Visual Basic give us powerful insight into what’s happening with GenAI

What does Windows95 and Visual Basic have to do with GenAI?

Quite a lot, as it happens. It’s a magnificent example of how industries get overtaken.

1994 was a transformational year for me - I moved to California, was working for Gupta Technologies and traveling around the world, consulting on SQLWindows and SQLBase architecture, design and performance issues.?

Our biggest competitor was PowerBuilder. They had the DataWindow. We had TableWindows. They had Sybase as a database. We had SQLBase. We were two giants of industry, competing for deals all over the world and in the Fortune5000 boardrooms.

You get the picture. Lords of all we surveyed.

And then, something happened. Windows95 came out; and developers started really using Visual Basic.?

We scoffed at it. There was no database behind it, there was no native data control, there was no thinking about building large-scale applications with it. A lot of us dismissed it as a toy language for hobbyist developers.?

But, inexplicably, VB kept making inroads. Increasingly, developers — and CIOs, on behalf of their companies — chose that tool for building enterprise applications. We started losing deals; and market share; and stock value. We tried to respond: we created a budget version called SQLWindows Solo.

But all to naught.?

Three principal reasons:

1. Visual Basic was priced at 1/100th the list price of SQLWindows. Literally. Our product was priced around $5K at list; and VB was $50.?(Yes, monopoly practices, but that's extrinsic to this aspect of the situation)
2. Developers working with Visual Basic innovated without constraint. In my own words, they “didn’t know it couldn’t be done.” People rolled out applications, rapidly
3. The things that SQLWindows & PowerBuilder offered - data scalability - were de-prioritized in the urge to get new corporate applications to market, as quickly and cheaply as possible

How does this relate to GenAI and all the rest of it??

Right now, the leading players are multi-billion dollar companies. The scale and cost of GenAI -- computing resources, training corpuses and all the rest of it, are such that only the largest of companies can make that investment. However, we’ll inevitably -- and quickly -- see smaller players coming out; at 1/10th or 1/100th the scale of these big players. They’ll likely be niche operators. A lot of them will fail or morph away.

But, assuredly, they’ll change the nature of the industry.

This will be fundamentally different from how Search and Community companies (Google/Bing/Yahoo? & Meta/Reddit/TikTok) operate, at the largest scale in a winner-take-all world.?

We already have a great model for this, on our phones. On our desktops, we were used to large applications with many features. On our phones, we’re now accustomed to many apps each having a very precise focus; and we’re happy to use one app for recording our calendars and another for booking meetings (Google calendar versus TidyCal).?

What will this mean for the industry??

First and foremost - a ton of malfeasance. Wherever there’s a compelling new technology, the agents of evil make their play: fraud, pornography, blackmail. With the evolution of AI, it won’t require state actors and super-computers to generate realtime deep fakes. High-schoolers will do it on their phones.

Second, although good work is going into thinking about the ethics of AI, we have to assume three things:

• unethical players will ignore the rules in imaginative and destructive ways
• the consequences of this power will be overlooked by the legions of developers who are building with best intent but unintended consequences
• people will build and lease out AI stacks that are purpose-built for malfeasance

We're on the way to the future already: You can run Google's AI tool locally?in your Chrome Browser, with two lines of code.

This calls for a comprehensive suite of node, edge and network-based?solutions. Stay tuned for the next post on this topic.?

I love to meet and learn from people with different points of view. Hit me up; and if you win the whatever argument we have. I'll buy you a cup of coffee.