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The interesting thing about waves of technology disruption is there is usually more than one wave in play at a time, and so a technology can both be disrupting and disrupted. The web was invented in 1989, popularized in 1995, and arguably the point where people realized "Hey, desktop apps are in trouble" was around 2004 when GMail and Google Maps came out. Even so, Dropbox was founded in 2007 as a desktop software company, and that hasn't stopped them from being worth a few billion.

Mobile apps were invented in the 1990s (Newton, Palm), popularized in 2008, and (at least in Silicon Valley) it's a big topic of debate whether the web is dead. In my old job - Google Search - I was still pretty secure as a web guru. In my new job - startup founder - I feel that I at least have to do my due diligence and evaluate the technology.

Whether it's a problem for your career depends on exactly what you want to be doing with your career. There are still people making a living off of COBOL and IBM mainframes. In general, consumer markets peak about 5 years after the technology is introduced to the general public (so microcomputer apps came into their own around 1980 with Visicalc, windowing apps around 1990 with MSWord and various office suites, webapps around 2000 with Google etc, mobile just starting to peak now with Uber/Instacart/etc.) If you're founding a startup you need to account for the time it takes to build your product, so in general you want to use technologies not more than 2 years old. If you're working at a company you don't want to use technologies until the companies that have adopted them have gotten big, so it's frequently 10 years or so after adoption.




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