The Zoom and Slack IPOs show what Microsoft is missing in its growth story: a way to acquire new customers.

The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.

Stripe’s announcement of Treasury — banking-as-a-service — manifests the breadth of the company’s ambition.

How TikTok exposed Facebook’s blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why those Chinese roots make TikTok a genuine concern.

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.

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.

Charting ESPN’s rise, including how it build leverage over the cable TV providers, and its ongoing decline, caused by the Internet.

There are four Internets: China versus the U.S., and the E.U. and India. India’s potential new model rests on Jio.

Companies succeed or fail not based on technology but rather according to their ability to integrate within their value chains.

Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.

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 on…

The newest version of Stratechery.com: now explore the site via concept, company, or topic, or use dramatically improved search functionality. Plus, a new logo!

TV is moving from a world where distribution dictates business models to one where business models need to fit the jobs consumers want done. That is the best way to understand Disney’s latest…

The WeWork IPO is defined by audaciousness and excess, all of which is driven by unlimited access to capital.

Twitter has a new policy to listen to experts about what content to limit; what happens, though, when experts are wrong?

Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.

Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to become a major player in an Internet 3.0 world, where politics matter more than economics.

Cloudflare’s new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.

Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.

It is all but impossible to beat an Aggregator head-on, as Walmart is trying to do with Amazon. The solution instead is to build a platform like Shopify.

Announcing Passport, the new infrastructure supporting Stratechery.

The Windows division no longer exists at Microsoft, marking the end to a four-year process of changing Microsoft’s culture.

Twitter went too far last week for reasons that go back to 2016 and the unfair blaming of tech for media’s mistakes.

The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…

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 s…

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.

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.

The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2019.

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…

Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…

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.

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. That is why Facebook gave up so much control.

Marc Andreessen has written (another) seminal essay: It’s Time to Build. What does that mean for tech and venture capital?

Sequoia’s transformation of its venture capital model is actually a shift from financial capital to productive capital

Apple’s management made three errors that led to the restatement of revenue; those errors, though, suggest that the company’s business is in better shape than it appears.

Apple and Facebook seem like they are in conflict, but have often been each other’s best partners.

Instagram’s shift away from being a photo-sharing app is very much inline with the service’s continuous evolution.

Uber has a new CEO, and the reason he is a great choice explain why the Uber job is still an attractive one.

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.

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.

Amazon’s latest offering highlights the economic challenges facing open source companies — and Amazon should pay attention.

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.

Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients.

The history of credit cards helps explain why Plaid is valuable to Visa, and how Visa can make it significantly better.

The lesson of BuzzFeed is that dominant Aggregators like Facebook have no incentive to act against their self interest and support suppliers.

Google and Facebook represent one philosophy, and Microsoft and Apple represent another; tech needs both, but ultimately platforms are more important than aggregators.

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?

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.

Netflix is an Aggregator, with a value chain that lets it drive demand, raise prices, and dismiss competition.

Apple’s original competitive advantage — the integration of hardware and software — is more durable than disruption theory would suggest.

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.

Shopify should build an advertising business to complement Shop Pay and the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Disney’s reorganization reinforces their integrated strategy; there is a lot to learn for anyone competing with Aggregators.

Money is made at chokepoints, and the most valuable chokepoints are operating systems; Amazon is building exactly that with Alexa.

It’s trivial to say that the Internet changed media; what is more interesting is unpacking how different types of media were affected, and why — and what might happen to TV.

The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2017.

Benchmark’s lawsuit against Uber is extraordinary; that is because Uber, despite everything, remains an extraordinary company. Game theory explains the implications.

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.

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.

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…

Dollar Shave Club is a textbook example of how the new Internet economy will destroy value in incumbent industries.

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.

Spotify has a marginal cost problem, but while the cause is unique to Spotify, the challenges are more applicable than it seems.

First, a reposting of an old Stratechery article, Rebuilding the World Technology Destroyed. Then, why Twitter is an essential antidote to Facebook and must be preserved.

Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM only makes sense from a financial perspective, unless you buy Jensen Huang’s datacenter dreams.

Larry Ellison has declared that Oracle is a cloud company, but their customer offering seems more suited to the world that was.

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.

Marques Brownlee has tremendous power because he can go direct to consumers; that is possible in media, and AI will make it possible everywhere.

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.

Facebook has long had too much power, but Mark Zuckerberg’s expressed willingness to use said power for political ends means it’s time to consider countermeasures.

The Internet ends gatekeepers and increases transparency, which has world-altering effects — both good and bad.

Formula 1 has done an impressive job earning fans; the NBA should study it, because the pay TV bundle is slowly disintegrating

Google Shopping is changing its model, suggesting Google is joining the Anti-Amazon Alliance; 3rd-party merchants should do the same.

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.

Netflix has been resolutely opposed to selling ads, prioritizing the user experience; however, the market conditions for streaming have changed, and so should Netflix

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.

Amazon’s logistics investment makes the company increasingly attractive to 3rd party merchants.

Facebook is under fire for fake news and filter bubbles; they are a problem, but most of the proposed solutions are far worse.

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.

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.

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.

The advertising has shifted from a Google-Facebook duopoly to one where Amazon and potentially Apple are major forces.

Amazon’s new Buy With Prime announced the arrival of Amazon Logistics as a Service, and is a big red flag for Shopify.

The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2018.

Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it.

The Metaverse of Snow Crash is not a good analogy for the future, as the Internet breaks down into Stephenson’s dystopia

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 for t…

The iPhone X is a quintessential Apple product, because it is the best; is there a market for iPhone 8?

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.

Stratechery is launching a new feature for subscribers: The Daily Update, as a podcast. Now you can read or listen to every post on Stratechery.

Meltdown and especially Spectre are vexing vulnerabilities, precisely because processors are working as designed. All we can do is muddle through.