Death of the App... Birth of New WYSISYG

As the Slack API makes writing platform specific conversational chat bots easier, and as YC churns out new companies like Prompt, making a Twilio-like Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables easy cross-platform development, there will be an explosion of conversational AIs built over the coming months not dissimilar from the Apple July 2008 App Store launch. Moreover, as Slack has developed an $80 million fund to support bots on their platform, there is a coming race for platform dominance. On April 12, Facebook will host its F8 Developer Conference, and I would suspect them to move heavily into this space as well. I suspect Facebook will launch their own SDK or app store where chat bots can be built atop Facebook Messenger, trying to pull attention away from other systems like Slack and their Slack Fund. We are at the dawn of the end of the app-era, and in the future chat-based ecosystem, what you say is what you get. 

The new WYSIWYG is here. What you say, not what you see, matters.