Electricity took roughly 40 years to go from novelty to something city dwellers forgot they lived without. The web compressed that to about 20. Mobile did it in eight.
Each wave follows recognizable markers: protocol standardization, governance handoff to neutral bodies, developer ecosystem consolidation, then invisibility. Agents are hitting these markers faster than any predecessor. MCP and A2A both moved from single-vendor control to Linux Foundation governance in under 12 months. The web took a decade to make that same move.
If the compression pattern holds, a three-to-five-year infrastructure arc is plausible. Worth asking: what does that actually feel like from the inside?