June 23, 2025
“Why does my computer need another computer?” That’s what people said about virtualization in the early 2000s. It seemed like wasteful overhead—you’re using real resources to simulate resources you already have. Critics pointed to performance penalties and questioned why you’d add complexity when you could just run applications directly on hardware.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the twist: while people are still asking these questions about MCP, the industry has already answered them. Decisively. MCP isn’t being “missed” at all—it’s experiencing the fastest protocol adoption in AI history. The skeptics are still skeptical, but the builders are already building.
Fast-forward to today, and we’re hearing the same refrains about the Model Context Protocol (MCP): “Why do we need MCP when I can already paste data into Claude or use APIs?” It’s that same “why add another layer?” reaction that every transformative abstraction faces.
The Pattern of Inevitable Success
The skepticism toward MCP follows a predictable pattern—the same one we saw with every transformative abstraction. The difference is that this time, we can watch the adoption happen in real-time despite the skepticism.
When HTTP was introduced in the early 1990s, people were already accessing internet resources through FTP, Gopher, email, and newsgroups. The web seemed like just another way to do things they could already do, but with more complexity. Yet while critics debated the “overhead,” builders were already creating the foundations of the modern web.
The same thing is happening with MCP right now. While some are still asking “why do we need this?”, the industry’s biggest players have already voted with their engineering resources.
MCP’s Boom Moment is Already Here
Here’s what everyone missed: MCP isn’t sitting at the same inflection point as early virtualization or HTTP. It’s already hit its boom moment, and we’re watching it play out in real-time.
The last 8 months tell an incredible story:
November 2024: Anthropic releases MCP as an open standard
February 2025: Over 1,000 open-source connectors emerge
March 2025: OpenAI adopts their competitor’s protocol across all products
May 2025: Microsoft builds MCP directly into Windows 11 at Build 2025
When your biggest competitor adopts your protocol, you’ve won. When Microsoft makes it a “foundational layer for secure, interoperable agentic computing” and builds it into their operating system, the game is over.
The USB-C Moment
Technology writers have dubbed MCP “the USB-C of AI apps,” and this analogy is perfect. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect devices to various peripherals, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.
But here’s the thing about USB-C—it didn’t just replace existing connectors, it enabled entirely new categories of devices and interactions. Similarly, MCP isn’t just making AI connections cleaner; it’s building the substrate for AI systems to become genuinely autonomous, collaborative, and emergent.
What the Skeptics Are Missing (While Everyone Else Builds)
The current skepticism sounds eerily familiar: “Why do we need all these AI protocols when we already have APIs?” It’s the same reaction the early internet got—“why do we need all these different protocols when we already have email and FTP?”
But here’s what’s different this time: the adoption is happening faster than the skepticism can keep up. While critics debate whether we “need” MCP, OpenAI has already adopted it, Microsoft has built it into Windows, and thousands of developers are shipping MCP servers.
We’re not just getting “virtualization for AI”—we’re getting the entire TCP/IP stack equivalent for artificial intelligence. MCP for model-to-external-system connections, A2A for agent-to-agent communication, various tool-calling standardization efforts, multi-agent orchestration protocols, AI workflow coordination standards.
The boom happens when these protocols mature and interlock, creating a standardized “AI internet”—and that boom is happening right now, not in some distant future.
The Evidence is Overwhelming
The adoption velocity is unprecedented. From Anthropic’s initial release to Microsoft embedding it in Windows—that’s faster than HTTP adoption in the early web. When OpenAI, Microsoft, and GitHub all join the MCP Steering Committee within months of each other, we’re not looking at gradual adoption curves. We’re looking at an industry standard emerging in real-time.
Early adopters like Block, Apollo, Zed, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph have integrated MCP into their systems. Goldman Sachs and AT&T are using MCP-compatible models for business functions. Even academic research is ramping up, with comprehensive papers analyzing MCP’s landscape and security implications already published.
We Don’t Want Another Protocol, We Want “The” Protocol
Here’s the thing about humans—we’re strange creatures who like to cluster around standards. We don’t actually want five different AI protocols to choose from; we want one clear winner that everyone can rally behind.
Remember A2A and all the other “MCP-ish” protocols we were tracking? They’re becoming rounding errors. When everyone’s talking about MCP as the universal connector and building it into their core infrastructure, the competition isn’t really competition anymore.
This clustering behavior is deeply human. We consolidated around USB-C instead of maintaining 15 different connector types. We settled on HTTP instead of keeping Gopher, FTP, and others in perpetual competition. There’s something psychological about wanting one clear standard rather than constantly evaluating multiple options.
It’s not that these other protocols are bad—they’re just solving narrower problems while MCP solves the fundamental interoperability challenge. But more importantly, MCP won the psychological game by becoming “the protocol” that everyone talks about, rather than “a protocol” among many.
Why This Matters
We’re witnessing something remarkable: a protocol achieving industry-standard status in real-time, and the progression is accelerating beyond what anyone predicted.
We started with GitHub releasing MCP servers for basic integrations. Then came multi-agent orchestration where AI systems coordinate complex workflows across platforms. Now we’re building toward AI systems that autonomously form coalitions, negotiate resources, and solve problems spanning entire digital ecosystems.
In five years, asking “why do we need MCP?” will sound exactly like asking “why do we need the internet?” sounds today—charmingly quaint and completely missing the point. But unlike HTTP or virtualization, we don’t have to wait decades to see the transformation. It’s happening right now.
The skeptics are looking at MCP like it’s just “a fancier way to connect things we can already connect.” But we’ve already moved past simple connections to orchestrated AI workflows, and we’re rapidly heading toward something that looks more like a global AI coordination layer.
We’re building the nervous system for distributed artificial intelligence. And unlike previous infrastructure revolutions, this one isn’t waiting for skeptics to catch up.
The question isn’t whether MCP will become the standard—it already has. The question is whether you’re building on it yet.