Modularity and Integration: Fit Against Flexibility
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.
Category
Technology & Platforms
Metcalfe's Law: Why Second Place Is So Much Worse Than Second
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.
Amara's Law: Too Much in Two Years, Too Little in Twenty
The same technology gets overestimated early and underestimated late. Both errors come from drawing a straight line through something that is slow first and rapid afterwards.
Semiconductors: Everything Depends on a Handful of Buildings
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.
A 'Law' That Was Actually a Self-Fulfilling Industry Roadmap
Moore's Law wasn't a discovered law of physics. It was an observed trend that the entire industry then organized itself around achieving.
The Architecture Decision Inside Every LLM
Transformers won not because they were the cleverest idea, but because they were the most parallelizable one.
Compute Is Becoming a Commodity — Slowly, and Expensively
GPU datacenters look like a technology story. They're really a capital-intensity story with technology as the excuse.
Microservices Weren't Wrong — They Were a Phase
Every architecture pendulum swing gets described as a discovery. Most of them are a rediscovery of a trade-off nobody wrote down.
The Network Perimeter Was Always a Fiction
Zero-trust isn't a new security philosophy so much as an admission that the old one never actually worked.
When a Law Ends, the Industry Doesn't Stop — It Specializes
Moore's Law slowing down didn't end progress in chips. It ended the era where general-purpose silicon was good enough for everything.
Big Tech: The Companies That Own the Starting Point
None of these companies owns most of what it sells. They own the place people begin — and that turned out to be the most valuable position in the economy.
Artificial Intelligence: Follow the Cost Curve, Not the Benchmarks
The interesting number in AI is not what a model can do. It is what a unit of machine reasoning costs — because when that falls tenfold, whole categories of product become possible.
Cloud and Infrastructure: Renting Instead of Guessing
Before the cloud you bought servers for your busiest hour and let them idle the rest of the year. The change was financial rather than technical — and that is why it mattered so much.
Consumer Apps: Everything Is Decided at the Second Use
The graveyard is full of competent products people opened once. Downloads measure marketing; the second visit measures whether anything was actually solved.
The Hardware Business Nobody Wants to Admit They're In
Every device company eventually discovers it's actually a services company wearing a hardware costume.