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.
Topic
Semiconductors
Vertical Integration: Owning the Step That Decides the Product
Buying from specialists is usually cheaper, and sometimes it means you cannot be better than anyone else. The right boundary moves as an industry matures — and rarely gets revisited.
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.
The Amplification of Panic: The Bullwhip Effect and Supply Chain Volatility
A five percent shift in consumer demand stopped the world's car factories. The distortion happens on the way upstream — and it is entirely rational at every step.
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.
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.
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.
Quantum Computing's Real Bottleneck Isn't Physics Anymore
The hardest problems left in quantum computing are as much about error correction and business cases as they are about qubits.
Why Carmakers Started Acting Like Chip Companies
Vertical integration in EVs isn't about control for its own sake — it's a response to a supply chain that kept breaking at the worst possible layer.
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.
Geopolitics: Leaders Change, Coastlines Don't
Most commentary is about which leader decided what. Constraints — geography, resources, neighbours, demographics — explain the menu of realistic options, and they outlast every government.