The trickiest bit with my maps is you need to give up on a natural inclination towards time and learn to cope with uncertainty, using weak signals and likelihoods - see "Uncertainty is the key" - medium.com/wardleymaps/fi… ... there is a reason for this ...
... most landscapes are fluid, even geographical landscapes. But the timescale for the landscape to move is normally immaterial to the movement of the actors i.e. it takes me 17 hours to fly to Australia and during that time Australia doesn't move ...
... but in business that's not the case, on a timescale of building a large business (i.e. say a decade) then the entire business landscape can shift. Which is why I can't simply map movement over time, even if there was a consistent way of doing this (there isn't btw).
The only consistent way I've determined (someone else might find another) to provide visualisation of movement is to abolish the concept of time and map over evolution. The axis of evolution and the evolution curve have no time component other than a general direction of travel.
Solving this problem took me 6 months of intense banging my head against a wall, endless frustration, endless variants and over 9K data points. It has held up pretty well for the last decade - medium.com/wardleymaps/fi…
... is it perfect? No, it's a model. It'll be wrong eventually. Someone, somewhere will find a better way. This has been good enough for me and I have no intention of putting myself through this mental hell again. So, someone else can find something better.
But, if you really want to see how "Time" works on a map, then as an approximate this map provides the basics i.e. time isn't even consistent across a map. Movement is. 
The abolishment of time however has consequences i.e. we can't predict over time, we have to use a cheat sheet and weak signals to estimate where something is, we can only describe exact position after it has become a commodity (i.e. we can only describe the past in detail) ...
... but unless I create a crystal ball then I can find no way around this. The future turns out to be an information barrier and whilst we can anticipate change (i.e. movement) and its consequences, that's about it.
However, given all those limitations ... I personally still find maps remarkably useful despite their imperfections.
So when people ask me ....
a) How long from genesis to the introduction of a commodity? Today, approx 30-50 years but possibly that has speeded up to 20-30 years (I'll know in about 5 years)
...
a) How long from genesis to the introduction of a commodity? Today, approx 30-50 years but possibly that has speeded up to 20-30 years (I'll know in about 5 years)
...
b) How long until this product will be substituted by another product? Alas, impossible to say, that depends upon individual actors actions unlike movement (the stages of evolution) which depends upon aggregate market actions.
c) When will general purpose AI become a commodity? Well, weak signals put it at around 2030-2035 to start and then another 10-15 years to become the norm. These, of course, are weak signals not statements of fact. The future hasn't happened yet.
d) When will this thing be disrupted? Depends. If you're talking product to product substitution then we can't anticipate (individual actors). If we're talking product to commodity / utility then we can anticipate (weak signals). There are at least two forms of disruption.
e) This is all very complex, can't you make it simple? No. Time is complex. Really complex. Especially in mapping. If you want it simple, then buy me a Tardis or a functioning Crystal Ball.
Oh, and on the question of
"Should I be a fast follower or fast mover?"
which occasionally comes up, my answer is always "yes".
"Should I be a fast follower or fast mover?"
which occasionally comes up, my answer is always "yes".
