220 The World Wide Web Turns 35: What It Means for Your Future

Speaker A: M. This is Locketta Marketing, the podcast that helps you develop the lens for what makes legendary marketing legendary. Hosted by Christopher Lockhead, three time CMO godfather of category design and a high school dropout who the Marketing Journal calls one of the best minds in marketing. And the Economist calls off putting to some.

Speaker B: Thanks for pressing play. This is Lockhead on Marketing and I'm your host, Christopher Lockhead. Um, now let's go back to 1991, 35 years ago, when Tim Berners Lee opened the World Wide Web to the public. At that point, the entire worldwide economy was roughly 24 trillion. The whole thing, America, Europe, Japan, China. Every factory, every bank, every airline, every tech company, every category you can think of, every economic transaction added up to roughly 24 trillion 35 years ago. We're taping this in the summer of 26. Okay, now consider this. The World bank has cited that the digital economy represents about 15 and a half percent of global GDP in, uh, 2016. And they say it was on track to be 25% of GDP in 2025. We don't have the data yet, at least I haven't seen it, but let's say it's around 25% right now. So let's think about what that means. 25% of the global economy now runs, uh, digitally, primarily, of course, because of the creation of the web, which of course sits on top of the Internet. Okay, so what does all this mean? This economic activity now depends on these digital technologies. Tens of trillions a year. And in 1991, it was zero. So we teach category designers, that entrepreneurial category designers, creator capitalists who are creating new categories and new offerings can create value out of nothing. 1991, there was no World Wide Web. And today, trillions of dollars, almost none

Speaker C: of the categories responsible for that value

Speaker B: existed back then in 1991. Of course. How could they. So imagine a world with no Google, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, uh, Facebook, Nvidia, Uber, Airbnb, Cisco, Spotify, aws, Amazon. If I didn't say it, imagine a world with no Apple Store, no creator economy, no cloud computing, no search, advertising and digital marketing industries, no social media, no ride sharing, no streaming, no e commerce, no SaaS, no nothing. Until the Web. That was not possible, you see, because when mega new categories, societal impact potential categories emerge, they open up the door to a massive amount of new value and category creation. And how that happened. People did it, entrepreneurs did it, creator capitalists and category designers and engineers and product designers and, and builders and people who make shit happen, people who make different Futures, people who create value out of nothing or value from very little, or value from combining several things that nobody had ever thought about in that way to solve a problem that nobody ever thought about in that way. And ta da net net, the web created the technology capability that created a gazillion, that created a big bang of new category opportunity. But it was human beings that then designed all those categories. And just think about what we can now create that was never possible in 1991. And there's an interesting thing in category design which is many, not all, but many new categories. Create new categories. It happens over and over and over again. And so that's what we saw with the web, a bunch of examples. So E commerce comes about back, um, in the late 90s. I was the founding CMO of a company called Scion. We were a services company, uh, putting uh, S&P 500 companies, big banks as well as startups, putting them on the web for the very first time, building their first web presence. And yes, we helped build some of the very early uh, web based E commerce capabilities. Okay, so the web creates the category category potential for E commerce as a whole new category. Well, once E commerce emerges, there's another sort of axiom at play here which goes like this. Today's solutions are tomorrow's problems. So as we go to create E commerce, a problem that we now have is we need to be able to create, we need a technology that's combined with that for payments. Ta da new category digital payments. Digital payments then enables a creative possibility for a new category that didn't exist before. Ta uh da marketplaces. Now I remember in the very uh, early days in the 90s, I had the pleasure of meeting Reed Hastings, who was the first investor and ultimately became the CEO of Netflix. And um, we met at a cocktail party in the late 90s and uh, at the time the company was emailing um, DVDs over the mail. And he said something to me that has stayed with me ever since. Remember the timing? It was the late 90s. I don't remember, I don't have it in front of me. But penetration of broadband was very de minimis at best. When you wanted to get on the Internet, you plugged it into your phone and you heard this kind of a sound that happened. And um, people who are of my vintage will remember it. Well anyways, he said, we named the company Netflix because we know over time we will be able to deliver digital media, movies, TV shows on the Internet. But broadband adoption is so low, we gotta wait so we gotta deliver it by the mail. That's why the company's called Netflix and not mail flicks. And so in, I don't know exactly. 98, 99. When I had this conversation with Reid at the cocktail party, he knew that broadband was going to create streaming. We didn't have the category name streaming then, but he knew it. Okay, smartphones, they empowered app stores at a level that we never could have imagined. And then app stores opened the door to all kinds of new categories. You know, the ability to order any food that you want. Ta da. Uh, doordash. The ability to create a ride sharing category. Social networks, what did they do? They created global networks. Oh. And what did smartphones in the cloud do?

Speaker C: Ta da.

Speaker B: Podcasting. You know why podcasting is called podcasting? Because originally it was actually pre smartphones because you could deliver them to your ipod, which was the technical, um, device you used from Apple to listen to music. And so, ta da, you could listen to audio of any kind. And podcasting emerged and then the smartphone turbocharged it immensely. The smartphone is really what created podcasting, uh, and opened the doors to a level of innovation that we could never imagine. You had to go to a recording studio to do this. My recording studio is my office and my house. And that's where most podcasters work from. Um, and then from there, because of the cloud, because of the smartphone, because of the Apple Store, all these new categories create the opportunity to build a whole new category of global audience that is reachable by creator capitalist. This oddcast you're listening to. As much as it blows my mind is downloaded in 190 countries. Couldn't do that before.

Speaker C: And of course the creator economy itself,

Speaker B: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so every new category, excuse me, many new categories create more new categories. And some mega categories, some societal level change categories, like the Internet, like the smartphone, like the cloud, and now like AI, create exponential opportunities for new categories. They're not creating one market. These mega categories are category, uh, creation platforms or machines.

Speaker C: All right, so let's just think about AI.

Speaker B: What if AI is the most powerful category creation platform ever? What if it's more powerful than the web? That is to say, what if AI unleashes level of creativity and innovation that allows human beings to create all kinds of new categories of products, services, experiences, anything you could possibly imagine that would materially make a difference in the way we live, work and play. So that's what I'm positing to you.

Speaker C: So if the web democratized access to

Speaker B: information and distribution and created a ubiquity there that we now enjoy. I believe I don't have it in front of me, but I believe more than two thirds of the world is on, um, the World wide Web today anyway. If it's not that, it's a giant percentage. So the web democratized access to information and distribution in a way that we couldn't even imagine back in the late 90s. AI is doing that right now to knowledge. So as we've talked about in the past, every day, AI makes existing knowledge closer and closer to free with the emergence of agents, um, and agents on top of agents on top of agents, nested agents. Agents really execute business functions, life functions, anything that can be automated with a computer, any small capability, any process can be, uh, fulfilled by an agent, potentially. Right? And so what agents really do over time is make execution of many things closer and closer to free. So as existing knowledge and existing execution gets closer to free, it impacts everything from software development, uh, design, research, analysis, writing. Last handful of books we've written, all co created, vibe created. We're going to get to Vibe creating in a second. With AI, any strategy, document translations are being done this way. People are learning. With AI, it's an incredible way to have an interactive conversation. If you're studying about the geography, um, of Botswana, you can have an interactive conversation with the AI about the geography of Botswana. Of course, you can access a huge percentage of human expertise, and AI is a creation partner as well. All right, so a big question is, how much will AI impact the global economy? It's going to be a big number, from 7 trillion a year to 15 trillion a year or 30 trillion a year. My suspicion is it's going to be more than that. All of the potential prognosis. Prognosi is prognosi, the, uh, plural of prognosis. Anyway, all of those projections, all of those estimates are interesting and they do matter, but I think there's a really big thing here that nobody can calculate. That, um, is the even bigger question, which is how much economic value will be created by the categories that AI allows us to create that don't exist today. Now, could Steve Jobs have imagined everything that came after he created the new category of smartphone? Some of it for sure. A lot of it? Absolutely not. And those of us who were working in tech at the time, those of us who got those early iPhones and so forth, anybody who could have told you, they could have foreseen all of this is telling you the story. Some of it was foreseeable. For sure, the way it has impacted life for everybody. Uh, so we've learned a few things over the last 35 years since the web became available. New categories create new value, and legendary mega categories create something bigger. They create the conditions that are required for exponentially more new categories. That's what the web did. AI is doing it already at a scale we haven't seen before. And that will be a truer statement tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Which is why we believe that AI isn't simply another productivity tool. AI is the greatest company accelerant we've seen, and AI is the greatest career accelerant we've seen. So, on the 35th birthday of the Internet, it's pretty interesting to sit here and say, huh, huh? If AI is the greatest category design accelerant in history, what would I do now in both my career and my company?

Speaker C: All right, thank you so much for your time and attention. Um, we really appreciate you investing some

Speaker B: time, uh, with us.

Speaker C: And, um, don't forget to share two

Speaker B: podcasts you love with two people you love.

Speaker C: You know, podcasts are incredible gifts because they don't really cost anything, but they can deliver tremendous amount of value. You know, you're going to have a podcast lockhead as you learn to talk. I've been doing this almost 10 years now and, uh, still fub it up. But, you know, the interesting thing about podcasting, of course, is we can be ourselves and sometimes we do flub up things up when we talk.

Speaker B: So I just did.

Speaker C: And if you like this kind of thinking, if you want to support our work, and most importantly, if you want to have a breakthrough with your own career and learn how to category design the categories of the future, uh, design different futures, use AI to catapult your

Speaker B: career, and become a creator capitalist.

Speaker C: Somebody who shifts from selling their time, uh, for their knowledge to somebody who creates net new value and monetizes that value at scale. With AI, all of those things can be found in category Pirates. So go to categorypirates.com and there you'll learn about our courses, our, uh, top, uh, five business substack, our AI bots. There is a Pirate Eddie Bot, my partner Eddie, and recently we launched a Pirate Christopher Bot. So if you subscribe to category Pirates at the founding level, not only do you get every piece of content that category Pirates has ever created, all of

Speaker B: our research, all of our frameworks, all of the books we've ever written are

Speaker C: available through Category Pirates, um, as mini books. And at the founding level, you can play with AI by talking to the Pirate Eddie Bot and the pirate Christopher Bot. So go to categorypirates.com and check all of that out. Again, thank you so much for your time and attention. We are produced by the legendary Jason DeFilippo. Check out his podcast Grumpy Old Geeks. And the thought I will leave you with comes from Category Pirates. Who says? Who says? Who said everything is the way that it is because somebody legendary just like you changed the way that it was.