Think about your parents' record collection. Or the shoebox of cassette tapes in the back of someone's car. Or the stack of DVDs next to the television — maybe even a shelf of Blu-rays that haven't been touched since a streaming subscription arrived. These weren't relics of a distant past. They were the cutting edge of their day, and for most of us, they represent childhood or the not-so-distant memories of early adulthood.
Technology doesn't move in a straight line. It leaps.
One or Two Generations Is All It Takes
The record player dominated music for most of the twentieth century. Then the cassette made it portable. Then the CD made it digital. Then the MP3 made it weightless. Then streaming made ownership feel unnecessary. Each of those transitions happened within living memory — often within a single decade.
The same story played out in video. VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming happened so fast that the rental store became a museum piece before most people even noticed it was dying. Blockbuster had 9,000 locations in 2004. By 2014, it was down to one — a monument to how quickly "infrastructure" can become "obsolete."
"The people who built those technologies weren't slow or short-sighted. The pace was just that fast — and every generation that lived through it thought the dust had finally settled, right before the next leap came."
What's striking isn't the speed of any single transition — it's how reliably the pattern repeats. Each generation experiences its own version of this: a technology so embedded in daily life that it feels permanent, followed by a shift so complete that the old way becomes difficult to explain to anyone who didn't live through it.
The Internet Was the Last Great Leap
When the internet arrived as a commercial force in the mid-1990s, it changed everything about how we communicate, shop, work, find information, and relate to one another. It wasn't just a new technology — it was a new foundation. Every industry had to figure out what it meant to operate in a world where distance, friction, and information asymmetry had been radically reduced.
At Tacit Web Solutions, we were there for that transition. Founded in 2001, we were among the earliest to see that software delivered over the web — what we now call SaaS — could reshape how consumers live, not just how enterprises operate. We built one of the first cloud-based management platforms for the childcare industry at a time when "the cloud" wasn't even a term most people used.
We know what it feels like to be standing at the edge of a leap.
AI Is the Next Level of the Internet
What's happening now with artificial intelligence isn't a feature or an upgrade. It's a structural shift — the same category of change as the internet itself.
The internet collapsed distance. AI is collapsing expertise.
Tasks that used to require years of specialized training — writing, analysis, coding, financial planning, medical triage, legal research — are now something an individual can access through a well-designed interface. That doesn't mean experts are going away. It means the barrier between a problem and a solution just dropped dramatically, the same way the internet dropped the barrier between a question and an answer.
"For everyday consumers, that matters enormously. The person who couldn't afford a financial advisor now has access to intelligent, personalized financial guidance. The barrier between a problem and a solution just dropped in the same way the internet dropped the barrier between a question and an answer."
This is exactly why we built MyMoneyRight.ai — to give ordinary people the kind of money guidance that used to be reserved for those who could afford a personal finance advisor. The technology exists. The question is whether the products built on top of it will actually serve the people who need them most.
We've Been Here Before
The cassette player didn't survive the CD. The DVD didn't survive streaming. The question isn't whether AI will transform the internet as we know it — that's already happening. The question is whether the products built on top of it will solve real problems for real people, or whether they'll just be impressive demos.
At Tacit Web Solutions, we're building on the conviction that the most important AI applications aren't the ones that replace humans in boardrooms — they're the ones that quietly give everyday people tools they never had access to before. The kind of tools that let someone take control of their finances, understand their health, organize their household, or connect with their community in ways that used to require either money or expertise they didn't have.
Every generation gets one or two of these moments — a technology so fundamental that it redivides "before" and "after." The internet was one. AI is the next.
We've been building since the last one. We're not about to sit out this one.
Building on what's next?
If you have a consumer problem worth solving with AI, we'd love to hear about it. Our team has been at this since the early internet — we know how to ship real products at the pace this moment demands.
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Comments 2
Really resonates. I remember when my dad's CD collection was the pinnacle of technology — now my kids don't know what a CD is. The AI parallel is spot on.
The Blockbuster stat hit hard. 9,000 locations to one in a decade. We really don't appreciate how fast these shifts happen until we look back. Great piece.
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