AI vs. the Web Revolution in Retrospect
A retrospective comparison of the 1990s web revolution and the current AI revolution — adoption curves, the transient "implementer" role, which startups survived and why, the fate of the web-services consultancies.
You can read the contents and the first 2,000 characters.
Free accounts get the whole book.
- By Sahar Carmel
- Updated Nov 1, 2026
- 31 readers
From the first page
A working analysis, May 2026. Written to answer one question: if the AI revolution rhymes with the web revolution, where are we on the curve — and what does that mean for someone about to start a company?
Every technology wave gets compared to the last one, usually lazily. This comparison is worth making carefully because the web revolution is now complete — we can see the whole arc, from the 1994 consumer moment through the 2000 crash to the durable winners that emerged on the other side. That hindsight is a gift. It lets us ask not "what's exciting" but "what actually survived, and why" — and then hold the AI revolution up against that template to locate ourselves in time.
The thesis in one sentence: we are at roughly the web's 1998 — past novelty, real money moving, but before the knee — and the front of the adoption curve is moving 2–3x faster than the web did while the back of the curve is moving at the same speed or slower. Everything else in this book is an elaboration of that claim and its consequences.
It's easy to forget how total the discontinuity was, because the result is now invisible infrastructure. Before the web, every computer system was an island. Companies ran on mainframes and minicomputers — DEC VAX, the AS/400 — accessed through dumb terminals with no graphical interface. Inter-company data moved by fax, phone, and mail; the only electronic exchange was EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), expensive enough that only large players with banking-grade EFT roots could afford it.
Preview · 2,000 of 19,693 characters
