Context — not UI — becomes the competitive moat as apps shift from destinations to infrastructure¶
Insight: According to Google product leader Kathy Korevec, "It's not that software is dead. It's that the idea of place on the internet is dying." Software competed as destinations for fifteen years — apps, dashboards, URLs. In an AI era, tomorrow's winners will control longitudinal memory, cross-tool visibility, structured governed action, and trust earned over time. Products must evolve from bounded destinations into infrastructure layers that integrate into existing workflows.
Detail: The kitchen metaphor: asking someone to use your app feels like "inviting them to cook a fancy dinner in someone else's house" — unfamiliar interfaces, lost muscle memory, constant context switching. The explosion of low-cost AI-generated tools compounds this by flooding the web with "thin surfaces" that accumulate neither context nor trust. Rather than competing on UI design, contextual AI systems embed themselves into workflows, remaining mostly invisible until offering genuinely useful assistance based on accumulated patterns. The shift is from visible interaction toward dependable background progress.