Interface Shifts Kill Companies. Is yours ready for the next one?
Every era of technology has its hidden turning point—the kind you only recognize in hindsight.
In 2006, millions of people still carried iPods in one pocket and flip phones in the other. Mobile web browsing was clunky, apps weren’t a thing, and few imagined that the touchscreen would upend everything. Then the iPhone dropped. At first, it seemed like a sleek gadget for early adopters. Two years later, it was the blueprint for a new computing era and companies that didn’t pivot fast enough never recovered.
But if you zoom out, the pattern becomes clear: when the interface changes, the hierarchy changes with it.
Shift 1: Command Prompts to Graphics: Another example we think a lot about at PeKe Labs was the technological shift brought about by the graphical user interface (GUI). I still have distinct memories of being seven and learning how to create command prompts on MS Dos…and thinking that it must be the future of computing! Thank god I was wrong 🙂Ironically for me at least, Microsoft was the one rode the wave better than anyone because they chose to adapt to the interface ahead of time.. Their choice to make Windows universal, available on third-party hardware, let them scale faster than Apple, who had pioneered the GUI but kept it locked down. A decade later, it wasn’t the best tech that won. It was the company that built for the new default.
Shift 2: Graphics/Keyboards to Touch: I gave the example of touch interface evolution earlier but it’s worth revisiting because few people recall that Blackberry owned half the smartphone market when they turned their noses up at Apple. Even Nokia was dominant worldwide and refused to embrace touch interfaces. Both had hardware advantages. Both had massive user bases. And both collapsed. Not because they stopped innovating, but because they couldn’t reimagine their products around a new form of input. Swipes replaced buttons. Apps replaced folders. A whole new generation of companies, from Instagram to Uber, were born by building directly for that interface.
To really drill down on that for a second….remember all of the companies who had built image platforms for the web? Each one of those companies, in theory, would have had an advantage to building a touch-based image sharing platform. They had distribution. Market share. Real users. But Instagram was able to beat them to it by building directly for the interface evolution.
Shift 3: Visual to Spoken: More recently, we saw a similar thing happen in the voice input market. It’s hard to imagine that we would ever call Amazon as an upstart, but the reality is that when they first introduced Alexa they made a bet no one expected: that people would be willing to talk to a speaker. And while they weren’t necessarily first to market, they were the first to craft an ecosystem around that input format and they saw considerable growth from the decision. Immediately, it paid off for them competitively. Apple’s Siri fell behind, and Google flailed. The opportunity wasn’t in the assistant—it was in the interface layer. And Amazon moved first.
So what’s next?
If we follow the arc, it’s obvious: the future of interaction isn’t more screens. It isn't a louder voice assistant (although there are plenty of people who will chase this). It’s interaction that lives on and with the body: gesture, movement, embodied intent. AI systems are increasingly capable of responding in real-time, adapting to context.
Companies that plan for the resulting shift won’t just be addressing something novel, they’ll be surviving. History shows us that when a new interface arrives, the companies that fail to adapt don’t slowly decline. They disappear. Not because the world stopped needing what they built, but because they couldn’t reimagine how people wanted to access it.
If you’re building products that rely on how people interact with machines—media, productivity, commerce, wellness—now’s the moment to step back and ask: are we preparing for how interaction is changing?
Because one thing’s certain:
Some companies are.
