Geometric change on Internet

I've watched several products 'go geometric' meaning consumers quickly accepted and bought them.  Geometric is unlike automobiles, telephones, radio and consumer bank accounts which took decades to penetrate the market.  Geometric is unlike TV which took more than a decade.

One of the first geometric products to reach broad acceptance, happened in the 1970s.  It was the global credit card (Visa and my own Mastercard).  Another was the Sony Walkman and still another was electronic games such as Pong and its successors.  Most of these took roughly five years to penetrate the market.

Today, with the Internet, geometric has reached a new level.  Amazon shopping, Google searching and Craigslist listing reached major penetration in under five years.

The world is not moving faster. Change is not inherently more rapid.  This rapid penetration has little or nothing to do with the Internet itself or better marketing, in my opinion: It has to do with more (1) sophisticated customers combined with (2) a well developed complex market.

Let me explain.  Craigslist had a great advantage because it was free for most uses, and 19th Century newspaper management refused to compete with Craigslist.  But the real marketing advantage that Craigslist had and has is the ability to sort ads by neighborhood, small neighborhoods in most cases... which matters to people who want property, apartment rentals or to pick-up merchandise quickly.  Craigslist can also be sorted by price and many elements more effectively than any print listing.  I call that the result of sophisticated customers and a well developed market (with payment systems already in place).

Amazon was and is the beneficiary of rapid and trusted home delivery services (FedEx, UPS etc) and a reliable payment system (credit cards, PayPal etc). Sophisticated customers had learned to order and trust retailers via catalog sales and were ready for Amazon. The developed market provided delivery and payments systems.

Google took off because the front page had no advertising.  A sophisticated market immediately invested Google with more trust than banner ad search engines.  Google also benefited from a developed market; Google arrived at the same time that a vast number of newspapers moved online to satisfy news searches, the same time as Wikipedia became trusted and covered vast subject areas and importantly Google joined the search world with reliable mapping and better word combination algorithms that had been weak (Boolean) before Google's arrival.