Stratechery
@stratechery
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Articles and Updates from https://t.co/A7bGqyJ7db. For the author, follow @benthompson.
Joined March 2013
Amazon's New Customer. Whole Foods is a retailer, but that is not what Amazon bought.
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Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, and the SaaS Opportunity. The Zoom and Slack IPOs show what Microsoft is missing in its growth story: a way to acquire new customers.
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Stripe: Platform of Platforms. Stripe's announcement of Treasury — banking-as-a-service — manifests the breadth of the company's ambition.
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The TikTok War. How TikTok exposed Facebook's blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why that China connection make TikTok a genuine concern.
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The China Cultural Clash. The NBA controversy in China highlights a culture clash that both tech companies and the U.S. government need to take to heart. Plus, why Tiktok being Chinese is increasingly a problem.
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Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund. Uber represents something new: a company that is different than incumbents because of technology, yet not itself a tech company — just like the Venture Fund is not a VC.
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The Rise and Fall of ESPN's Leverage. Charting ESPN's rise, including how it build leverage over the cable TV providers, and its ongoing decline, caused by the Internet.
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India, Jio, and the Four Internets. There are four Internets: China versus the U.S., and the E.U. and India. India's potential new model rests on Jio.
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The Value Chain Constraint. Companies succeed or fail not based on technology but rather according to their ability to integrate within their value chains.
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Clubhouse's Inevitability. Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.
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Stratechery 4.0. New ways to explore Stratechery, dramatically improved search, and a new logo.
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The End of the Beginning. The beginning of technology was about the shift from batched computing in one place to continuous computing everywhere. That era of paradigm changes may be over, which means the real changes are only beginning.
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Disney and the Future of TV. TV is moving from a world where distribution dictates business models to one where business models need to fit the jobs consumers want done.
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DeepSeek FAQ. DeepSeek has completely upended people's expectations for AI and competition with China. What is it, and why does it matter?.
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The WeWork IPO. The WeWork IPO is defined by audaciousness and excess, all of which is driven by unlimited access to capital.
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Unmasking Twitter. Twitter has a new policy to listen to experts about what content to limit; what happens, though, when experts are wrong?.
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The Slack Social Network. Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can't match.
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Why Ajit Pai Is Right. Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
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Cloudflare on the Edge. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to become a major player in an Internet 3.0 world, where politics matter more than economics.
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Cloudflare's Disruption. Cloudflare's new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.
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Spotify's Podcast Aggregation Play. Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator is cannot be when it comes to music.
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Shopify and the Power of Platforms. Platforms are the way to compete with Aggregators; Shopify is a good example.
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Passport. Announcing Passport, the new infrastructure supporting Stratechery.
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The End of Windows. The Windows division no longer exists at Microsoft, marking the end to a four-year process of changing Microsoft's culture.
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Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability. Twitter went too far last week for reasons that go back to 2016 and the unfair blaming of tech for media's mistakes.
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Attenuating Innovation (AI). Innovation required humility about the future and openness to what might be possible; Biden's executive order proscribing AI development is the opposite, blocking progress and hindering the solutions to our greatest challenges.
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The 2019 Stratechery Year in Review. The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2019.
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The Relentless Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO's in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.
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The iPhone Franchise. The iPhone is a franchise, a product that will make money in well-defined ways; Apple understands that and is exploiting it more than ever before with the iPhones XS and XR.
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Tech and Liberty. The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can still do better).
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Where Warren's Wrong. Warren's proposal is wrong about history, the source of tech company power, and the nature of tech itself. Then, what antitrust regulation should actually focus on.
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Amazon Health. Amazon Health doesn't seem like much now, but there are hints it could be the ultimate application of Aggregation Theory.
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Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game. Libra is less about an immediate benefit to Facebook, and more about creating a world where companies like Facebook have the best chance to prosper.
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How Tech Can Build. Marc Andreessen has written (another) seminal essay: It's Time to Build. What does that mean for tech and venture capital?.
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Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of History. The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.
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Apple's Errors. Apple's management made three errors that led to a revenue warning; those errors, though, suggest that the company's business is in better shape than it appears.
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Sequoia Productive Capital. Sequoia’s transformation of its venture capital is actually a shift from financial capital to productive capital.
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Apple and Facebook. Apple and Facebook seem like they are in conflict, but have often been each other's best partners.
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Today's Stratechery article is late due to an unexpected helping-daughter-prepare-for-a-test-that-she-was-very-stressed-about interruption.
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Uber's New CEO. Uber made a good choice; that able to, despite the dysfunction, shows the company's strength.
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Instagram's Evolution. Instagram's shift away from being a photo-sharing app is very much inline with the service's continuous evolution.
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Social Networking 2.0. Facebook and Twitter represent the v1 of Social Networking; it's a bad copy of the analog world, whereas v2 is something unique to digital, and a lot more promising.
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Facebook Lenses. Facebook was down dramatically after its last earnings; to decide if it is justified it is worth looking at the company through many different lenses, both financial and strategic.
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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source. Amazon's latest offering highlights the economic challenges facing open source companies — and Amazon should pay attention.
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Apple Vision. Apple Vision is incredibly compelling, first as a product, and second as far as potential use cases. What it says about society, though, is a bit more pessimistic.
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Note: I accidentally sent today's Daily Update out to the entire Stratechery mailing list, paid and unpaid. Oops, and you're welcome 😬.
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Back to the Future of Twitter. Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients.
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Visa, Plaid, Networks, and Jobs. The history of credit cards helps explain why Plaid is valuable to Visa, and how Visa can make it significantly better.
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The BuzzFeed Lesson. The lesson of BuzzFeed is that dominant Aggregators like Facebook have no incentive to act against their self interest and support suppliers.
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The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions. Carlota Perez documents technological revolutions, and thinks we’re in the middle of the current one; what, though, if we are nearing its maturation? Is crypto next?.
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Tech's Two Philosophies. Google and Facebook represent one philosophy, and Microsoft and Apple represent another; tech needs both, but ultimately platforms are more important than aggregators.
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Intel and the Danger of Integration. Intel is in an increasingly bad position in part because it has been captive to its integrated model. Or, you could simply say they were disrupted.
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Amazon Go and the Future. Amazon Go exemplifies how Amazon is building its monopoly in three ways: horizontally, vertically, and financially.
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Instagram's CEO. Kevin Systrom had the title CEO, but the one that built the business — and thus controlled its destiny — was Mark Zuckerberg.
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Netflix Flexes. Netflix is an Aggregator, with a value chain that lets it drive demand, raise prices, and dismiss competition.
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Apple at Its Best. The iPhone X is a reminder that Apple's HW/SW advantage is a durable defense against disruption.
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Intel Problems. Intel is in much more danger than its profits suggest; the problems are a long time in the making, and the solution is to split up the company.
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Shopify's Evolution. Shopify should build an advertising business to complement Shop Pay and the Shopify Fulfillment Network.
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Disney and Integrators Versus Aggregators. Disney's reorganization reinforces their integrated strategy; there is a lot to learn for anyone competing with Aggregators.
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Alexa: Amazon's Operating System. Operating systems are chokepoints, which is why they—and Alexa—are so valuable.
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The Great Unbundling. Not all media — nor all TV — is the same. That will be the root of unbundling.
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The Uber Dilemma. Game theory explains why Benchmark is risking its reputation to sue Uber. Plus, what comes next.
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The Cost of Developers. Microsoft paid a lot for GitHub, because it had to pay directly for access to developers. It doesn't have the leverage of users the way that Apple does on the App Store.
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The 2017 Stratechery Year in Review. The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2017.
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The Internet and the Third Estate. Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a "Fifth Estate"; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters.
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The State of Technology at the End of 2018. The State of Technology, at least in the enterprise space, is strong; consumer tech is another story, and it is time to question the dominance of big companies like Google.
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Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything. Dollar Shave Club is a warning about imminent value destruction.
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Disney and Fox. Disney's rumored acquisition of 21st Century Fox is all about competing with Netflix; whether or not that is a good thing depends on your frame of reference.
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Lessons from Spotify. Spotify has a marginal cost problem, but while the cause is unique to Spotify, the challenges are more applicable than it seems.
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Apple, Epic, and the App Store. The App Store is not one thing: it is installation, payments, and customer management; the further Apple gets from iOS, the worse its actions are for users and developers.
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Why Twitter Must Be Saved. Twitter's weaknesses are an essential antidote to Facebook's focus on engagement.
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Oracle's Cloudy Future. Building for the middle won't win the cloud; flexibility and focus matter.
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The Scooter Economy. Scooters are everywhere, and the use case is amazing. It's not clear if the businesses will be, which means more consumer surplus.
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Nvidia's Integration Dreams. Nvidia's acquisition of ARM only makes sense from a financial perspective, unless you buy Jensen Huang's datacenter dreams.
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The Facebook Brand. The Facebook brand is, due to Facebook's strategic choices, about not respecting privacy. That is why the Cambridge Analytica story is such a problem for the company.
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MKBHDs For Everything. Marques Brownlee has tremendous power because he can go direct to consumers; that is possible in media, and AI will make it possible everywhere.
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Dust in the Light. The Internet ends gatekeepers and increases transparency, which has world-altering effects — both good and bad.
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Manifestos and Monopolies. Facebook has long been too powerful, but Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto crossed the line.
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What the NBA Can Learn From Formula 1. Formula 1 has done an impressive job earning fans; the NBA should study it, because the pay TV bundle is slowly disintegrating.
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The Anti-Amazon Alliance. Google Shopping is changing its model, suggesting Google is joining the Anti-Amazon Alliance; 3rd-party merchants should do the same.
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The End of Silicon Valley (Bank). Silicon Valley Bank bears responsibility for its demise, but it symbolizes a Silicon Valley reality that is very different from the myth — and the ultimate cause is tech itself.
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Why Netflix Should Sell Ads. Netflix has been resolutely opposed to selling ads, prioritizing the user experience; however, the market conditions for streaming have changed, and so should Netflix.
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Apple's Services Event. Apple's Services Event generally made sense, even if most products weren't ready to launch. It's fair to wonder, though, if something important is being lost.
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Gemini and Google's Culture. The Google Gemini fiasco shows that the biggest challenge for Google in AI is not business model but rather company culture; change is needed from the top down.
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Fake News. Fake news and filter bubbles are a problem; the proposed solutions are worse.
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Uber's Bundles. Uber's crisis necessitated a new strategy: enter bundles.
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The Amazon Empire Strikes Back. Amazon's logistics investment makes the company increasingly attractive to 3rd party merchants.
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IBM's Old Playbook. IBM has bought Red Hat in an attempt to recreate its success in the 90s; it's not clear, though, that the company or the market is the same.
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AI Homework. The first obvious casualty of large language models is homework: the real training for everyone, though, and the best way to leverage AI, will be in verifying and editing information.
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Digital Advertising in 2022. The advertising has shifted from a Google-Facebook duopoly to one where Amazon and potentially Apple are major forces.
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The 2018 Stratechery Year in Review. The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2018.
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Beyond Aggregation: Amazon as a Service. Amazon's new Buy With Prime announced the arrival of Amazon Logistics as a Service, and is a big red flag for Shopify.
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Tulips, Myths, and Cryptocurrencies. The tulip bubble is a myth, which shows that myths are powerful — and valuable.
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Consoles and Competition. Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it.
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Metaverses. The Metaverse of Snow Crash is not the best analogy for the future, as the Internet looks more like Stephenson’s dystopian real world.
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Trade, Tariffs, and Tech. There is an argument for the Trump tariffs, but the risks are too great relative to the uncertain rewards.
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The Tragic iPad. The iPad is 10, and while it remains a useful device, it is ultimately a disappointment. Apple lost the vision for what the iPad could be, and never gave space for developers to figure it out.
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The Lessons and Questions of the iPhone X and the iPhone 8. The iPhoneX fits Apple; does that leave room for the 8?.
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Meta Myths. Meta deserves a bit of a discount off of its recent highs, but a number of myths about its business have caused the market to over-react.
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