Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is an 816Z podcast. I'm here with Benedict Evans and Bologi Shrinivasa.

Benedict, you've been talking a lot about this idea that we are in a pre-page-rank era of mobile.

Can you explain that? Yeah, so I think the issue is really this. When you look at an app store today, it's like looking at Yahoo in 95.

You know, you can browse a million apps.

You could browse 100,000 websites if it doesn't scale.

And there's no way for you to find the right things that you want to use on that device.

There's Google, but Google doesn't cover everything that you can do on a device. App stores don't, you know, the app stores are like Amazon.

They list every, you know, everything that exists, but they're not ways for you to discover

and explore that. So we're kind of in the phase that the internet was 20 years ago, that there's

all these different things going on on the device, but we don't really know how to find and explore them and you know in parallel with that we're also kind of

in like a pre-netcape phase because you know what happened on the internet was you had the web browser

as a box on your screen and everything happened inside that box and you had a few exceptions like

you know Spotify and Skype and stuff.

But basically everything happened in the browser.

And again, on smartphone, that's not the case.

So there's this kind of swirling mass of how do we find stuff?

How do we explore things?

What is the interaction model?

Is it an app?

Is it a card?

Is it a web app? Is it a URL? Is it a messaging app? How do you find stuff and explore and engage and acquire customers within that?

So I think there are at least two ways to interpret that. One is that hasn't, no one's invented that yet. And the second is the more pessimistic view is it's a fundamental architectural limitation of the platform, which is there's no browser because there's no HTML, right?

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