I can’t shake this phase.

It came from my friend David Semeria in a comment on avc this past weekend.

On one level it’s something that has been brewing for a while and self-evident as we watch the jostling and ongoing category spread of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Uber.

On the other, it’s an aha to startups and potential game changer raising questions about how we build companies and market our innovations.

The idea is powerful in its simplicity.

We think of innovations bubbling up from the bottom.

The very promise of the web itself is about giving voice to the authentic, empowering the few and the small to change the world for the many and reshufle the global status quo.

Today we have a culture of bottoms up innovation, an economics of disruption that is spewing a cross-generation of quite brilliant entrepreneurs. Out of incubators and accelerators. Out of seed funds. Out of personal capital.

Out of a societal belief that disruption is a business model and entrepreneurship a job description.

David’s phrase speaks to this turned on its head, to where the innovations are not coming bottom up, but top down. Not from the mass of small innovators but from the advantages of the platform incumbents. The core polarity of innovation shifting its axis.

The big platforms have a soft lock on our behaviors, a hard lock on our data and as creatures of habit, a solid spot in the premium brand positions on our phones.

Trickle down innovation meeting attention deficit and market complacency on the consumer side.

People in general don’t appear to be less curious, they do appear to have a higher threshold to change.

Download numbers on apps stays high, usage and replacing the incumbents on the first and second screens on our phones, has flattened.

How often do you change your messaging, commerce, social, transportation, financial and entertainment apps on the first few screens on your phone? Mine are locked in.

The idea of platform creep or in marketing terms, leveraging your brand cross category, is of course nothing new.

What is happening today though is different as it is about data ownership as key to brand dominance. About the breadth of these brands to leverage the depth of their data sets cross the pieces of our lives that matter the most to us.

If this is idea is true (and I think it is), if the innovation pipeline has shifted its access point and the consumer their propensity to adopt new brands, we are definitely in a brand new world. Literally.

And it raises a bunch of questions.

Will it stifle innovation? It will most certainly change the odds.

Can interesting products like Door Dash really take a chunk of the on demand local delivery market when there is Uber Rush?

Can they get us to install another app tied to our credit card when everyone already has Uber installed? Can they be that much better to give them a spot on our front screen in transportation row?

How does this dynamic change the core promise of the web that it is indeed possible for an individual to change the world?

I’m just not sure.

No one is too big to fail and the market is the greatest democratiser.

We all know that human behavior invariably proves spreadsheet logic wrong. Why Amazon is failing for the third time to own the $20B direct to consumer wine market or Google invariably swallowing its foot from G+ to G TV on anything consumer oriented are cases in point.

Truth be told though while my gut knew that this was happening I hadn’t thought about it in these terms. I look at analytics all the time see downloads without requisite engagement, engagement without transactions and sweat changes to test the why of it.

I now have a new viewpoint. I was ignorant as David states (and I paraphrase) that in AI driven models more data trumps a better algorithm. I didn’t have the language to understand the entrepreneurial disadvantage.

Take a look at the thread and the discussion. It’s worth it.

Share with me whether this is impacting how you are configuring your model today.

And mostly, as you iterate your brand forward how to play in a world where the odds are stacked against you.

That’s the most important piece to wrap our marketing heads around.