Fred Wilson has a great post up on his blog today about open protocols. By open protocols he is referring to things like TCP/IP (transmission control protocol and internet protocol), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). Whether you realize it or not, you rely on these protocols every single day if you go on the internet, browse the web, and write emails.

If you’re interested in these sorts of nerdy things, I recommend you read his post. I’m not going to write about open protocols today – though I do find them fascinating. Instead, I would like to talk about the last paragraph of his post. 

Here it is:

“I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation. Incumbents can adapt to and adopt new technological changes (web to mobile) way easier than they can adapt to and adopt new business models (selling software to free ad-supported software). So this new protocol-based business model feels like one of these “changes of venue” as my partner Brad likes to call them. And that smells like a big investable macro trend to me.”

This is interesting to me for 2 reasons.

Fred Wilson has a great post up on his blog today about open protocols. By open protocols he is referring to things like TCP/IP (transmission control protocol and internet protocol), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). Whether you realize it or not, you rely on these protocols every single day if you go on the internet, browse the web, and write emails.

If you’re interested in these sorts of nerdy things, I recommend you read his post. I’m not going to write about open protocols today – though I do find them fascinating. Instead, I would like to talk about the last paragraph of his post. 

Here it is:

“I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation. Incumbents can adapt to and adopt new technological changes (web to mobile) way easier than they can adapt to and adopt new business models (selling software to free ad-supported software). So this new protocol-based business model feels like one of these “changes of venue” as my partner Brad likes to call them. And that smells like a big investable macro trend to me.”

This is interesting to me for 2 reasons.