Archive
131 essays, grouped by category.
Technology & Platforms
Scale alone doesn't explain platform dominance — control over the interface between supply and demand does.
Nobody thinks about the cloud layer beneath a product — until an outage reminds everyone exactly how much depends on it.
Ten times the users gives roughly a hundred times the possible connections. The exact formula overstates things — the underlying point about compounding leads does not.
Every architecture pendulum swing gets described as a discovery. Most of them are a rediscovery of a trade-off nobody wrote down.
Control every part and tune the fit, or accept a standard interface and gain interchangeability. Which one wins turns on a single question — and the answer changes as a market matures.
Chip design is spread across hundreds of firms. Making the advanced ones happens in very few places — and that single asymmetry explains the shortages, the politics, and the fragility.
Transformers won not because they were the cleverest idea, but because they were the most parallelizable one.
Every device company eventually discovers it's actually a services company wearing a hardware costume.
Zero-trust isn't a new security philosophy so much as an admission that the old one never actually worked.
Moore's Law slowing down didn't end progress in chips. It ended the era where general-purpose silicon was good enough for everything.
The consumer app graveyard isn't full of bad products — it's full of good products with no reason for anyone to open them twice.