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.
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.
Profitable companies spend years building things and then hand them out for free. There's a clean piece of economics behind it — and it tells you where you sit in someone else's plan.
Retailers won't join without shoppers; shoppers won't come without retailers. Both are right to wait — and how you break that deadlock defines every marketplace business ever built.
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.
How the money arrives is the least interesting part. Every model has a lever for growing revenue and a cost attached to pulling it — and where that cost falls predicts behaviour under pressure.
Early networks showed you what your contacts posted, in order. A modern feed is a ranked selection made on your behalf — and what it optimises for explains most of the arguments about it.
A century of competition law detects monopoly by watching consumer prices. When the service is free, the test finds nothing — and the power sits somewhere it was never designed to look.
The market is usually described by its size, which leads to the wrong conclusion. Its shape matters more — and a product built for high willingness to pay does not become an India product by discounting it.