I just came across the “Why the iPhone Is Finally Fading” article. The author makes the case that it’s the emergence of devices for digital assistants the cause of the recent iPhone sales slowdown.

The article reminded me of the years prior to Cortana and the predictions that I and others in the industry were making at the time (here’s a post of mine from back in 2013: “Convergence of User Experiences”). Our prediction was that digital assistants and NUIs would be the natural next step in the evolution of how humans interact with knowlege, consume services, and perform tasks. It’s fun to now observe the humble beginnings of that predicted transformation.

I recently wrote a historical perspective of how we got here (unfortunately I can’t share it). I attempted to summarize what I believe are the key platforms with the following diagram.

PCs, the web, mobile devices, and application-platforms (e.g. Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, …) aren’t going away any time soon. However, we are witnessing the emergence of digital assistants as a viable competitor of the other platforms.
Interesting times!