This tweetstorm about unbundling by Marc Andreessen, shows us why exaptation (from the theory of evolutionary biology) just might become the next big idea in innovation and entrepreneurship.
1/A story of unbundling in the tech industry: 20 years of consumer Internet evolution -- http://t.co/qUCWjc4wkF — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
2/One upon a time there was AOL, which was a completely integrated Internet access/information/communication service. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
3/Then Yahoo came along and unbundled the information/communication parts like email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes from the access service. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
4/One of the things you could do on Yahoo was search, then Google came along and unbundled that. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
5/You can search for anything on Google, including people; Facebook came along with a much better way to just search for people. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
6/Three things you can do on Facebook are messaging, photo sharing, and status updates; therefore Whatsapp, Instagram, and Twitter. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
7/And yes, Yo unbundles the creation & existence of a message from the contents of a message, unbundling Whatsapp and Twitter :-). — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
8/Ev Williams (@ev) is the modern genius of this concept--playing out in our industry continuously since the 1950's. http://t.co/p6DzO6tGbL — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
9/The part people often miss is that you can get extremely powerful second/third order effects at each step with his pattern. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
10/The entrepreneurs generally have a pretty good sense of this when they're doing it, but it doesn't become clear to others until later. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
11/This is a pattern what we love to fund: unbundle X from Y, but then use the liberation of X as leverage to do amazing new things with X. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 24, 2014
P.S.
[1] Fred Wilson did a Tweetstorm about Tweetstroming. That explains it, but basically it's about turning Twitter into a live blogging platform.
[2] Sumukh Sridhara built Tweetstorm.io to better view and create Tweetstorms. It lists all of Marc Andreessen's Tweetstorms.
[3] Dave Winer built Little Pork Chop for Tweetstorming