The test of a framework is not whether it explains the past. Anything explains the past. The test is whether it would have flagged a shift while it was still forming, before the outcome was obvious and before the price reflected it.
Here is the seven-signal framework run backward on the three platform shifts we now understand completely: the web browser, cloud computing, and the smartphone. Each one is scored on the moment it began, not the moment it won. In all three, the early signals were already active while consensus was still calling it a toy.
The scores are binary. A signal is either active or it is not. Five active signals confirm a structural shift. The point of these three is what happens below five.
Mosaic turned the web into something you could see instead of something you typed commands at. The graphical browser was a genuinely new way to use a computer, and publishing to the entire world stopped costing anything. The people who build things noticed first.
Three of seven, and most of the computing industry filed it under research project. Distribution Capture, Capital Flood, and the incumbent scramble had not arrived. They arrived on schedule. Microsoft's internal memo calling the internet a tidal wave came in 1995. Netscape went public that August. By the time the score crossed five, the web was no longer a discovery. It was a stampede, and the good positions were already taken.
In March 2006, Amazon put storage behind an API and rented it by the hour. Compute followed that summer. For the first time you could start a company without buying a single server, and the thing you rented was a new kind of interface to computing itself.
Two of seven. A new interface and a cost collapse, and nothing else lit. Developers had not moved in force, no chokepoint had formed, no profit had migrated, and the incumbents were not yet worried. The people who read those two signals started companies on cheap infrastructure. The people who waited for the fifth signal to confirm the shift bought into cloud at a trillion dollars of agreement. A low score is not a no. It is a clock.
The iPhone replaced the keypad with a screen you touched. That was the entire product at launch. No app store, no developer kit, no third party anything for another full year.
Two of seven, and they were the two that matter most this early: a new interface, and the reigning leaders dismissing it in public. The App Store arrived in 2008 and turned on three signals at once. Distribution Capture, as every app suddenly needed one gate to reach every customer. Developer Gravity, as the builders poured in. Cost Collapse, as the cost of shipping software to a phone fell to nearly nothing. The score crossed five. By then the winners were already being chosen.
Interface Shift is active at the earliest moment every time. It is usually the first signal to light and the last one anyone bothers to argue about, because a new way of using a computer is hard to miss and easy to underrate.
The confirming signals show up last. Distribution Capture, Profit Migration, and Capital Flood are the signals that prove a shift is real, and they are the ones that arrive after the outcome is largely set. Five active signals is not an entry point. It is a receipt.
The advantage the framework gives you lives in the gap between the first signal and the fifth. That gap was years wide in all three of these. It is the window where taking a position is a decision instead of a rescue.