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. | Continue reading
Formula 1 has done an impressive job earning fans; the NBA should study it, because the pay TV bundle is slowly disintegrating | Continue reading
More on Bing, particularly the Sydney personality undergirding it: interacting with Sydney has made me completely rethink what conversational AI is important for. | Continue reading
Tech is increasingly divorced from the real economy thanks to the COVID hangover and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency | Continue reading
Announcing the newest addition to the Stratechery Plus bundle: Greatest of All Talk, a podcast about basektball, life, and national parks. | Continue reading
Netflix waited out Blockbuster with better economics, and it's seeking to do the same with its competitors today; the key to the company's differentiation, though, is increasingly creativity, not execution. | Continue reading
Given the success of existing companies with new epochs, the most obvious place to start when thinking about the impact of AI is with the big five: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. | Continue reading
Stratechery is on holiday from December 26, 2022 to January 5, 2023; the next Stratechery Update will be on Monday, January 9. In addition, the next episode of Sharp Tech will be on Monday, January 9, and the next episode of Dithering will be on Tuesday, January 10. Sharp China w … | Continue reading
The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2022. | Continue reading
Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
What Elon Musk got wrong about Twitter, journalists and VCs got wrong about FTX, and Peter Thiel got wrong about crypto and AI — and why I made many of the same mistakes along the way. | Continue reading
Stratechery Plus is expanding to include Sharp China with Sinocism’s Bill Bishop | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Understanding the path the semiconductor industry took to today both shows where China needs to go and also explains why the risks for geopolitical conflict are higher than ever. | Continue reading
Microsoft has come full circle from the company that cared more about Windows than Office; the retirement of the Office name is possible precisely because Microsoft gave up on Windows and went to the cloud. | Continue reading
Meta’s new hardware is more impressive than expected, and the Microsoft partnership makes a lot of sense. The question is if Meta will capture enough value to outweigh their costs. | Continue reading
Nvidia is in the valley in terms of gaming, the data center, and the omniverse; if it makes it to future heights its margins will be well-earned. | Continue reading
Stratechery is launching a new podcast: Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson. In addition, the Stratechery Update subscription has now been expanded to the Stratechery Plus subscription, including the Stratechery Update, Stratechery Interviews, Sharp Tech, and Dithering. | Continue reading
AI is starting to unbundle the final part of the idea propagation value chain: idea creation and substantiation. The impacts will be far-reaching. | Continue reading
Apple introduced some impressive product updates; the real news, though, were the prices, which suggested that Apple is fully embracing being a services company. | Continue reading
Google is not bound by the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, but its actions in a false positive CSAM case show that it is flouting the spirit behind them. | Continue reading
Trends in medium, AI, and user interaction underpin Instagram’s response to TikTok, and will determine Meta’s long-term moat. | Continue reading
Chips are the clearest example that economic efficiencies will not be the ultimate decider of technology’s end state: politics will play an important role. | Continue reading
The Big Ten’s recent expansion is being blamed on Fox and ESPN, but it is actually an example of content extracting maximum value through consolidation | Continue reading
The original definition of Aggregation Theory emphasized the importance of commoditized supply; that makes Spotify more of an Aggregator than Netflix | Continue reading
Explaining exactly why Apple’s approach to ATT is anti-competitive | Continue reading
Explaining exactly why Apple’s approach to ATT is anti-competitive | Continue reading
Zero-COVID is possible, but few of us in the West are willing to pay the costs; the exact same reasoning applies to free speech; in both cases China-lite is the worst possible strategy. | Continue reading
Elon Musk may be trying to renegotiate his Twitter deal by citing bots; all available evidence suggests that Twitter’s number is not only accurate, but conservative. | Continue reading
The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms | Continue reading
Warner Bros. Discovery is a company that makes a lot of sense, both because of its content and also its strategy, which treats streaming as an additional channel, not a reason-for-being. | Continue reading
Cable companies survived the great unbundling thanks to selling Internet service; they may be best place to make the bundle of the future. | Continue reading
Amazon’s new Buy With Prime announced the arrival of Amazon Logistics as a Service, and is a big red flag for Shopify. | Continue reading
Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients. | Continue reading
Machine-learning generated content has major implications on the Metaverse, because it brings the marginal cost of production to zero. | Continue reading
Netflix has been resolutely opposed to selling ads, prioritizing the user experience; however, the market conditions for streaming have changed, and so should Netflix | Continue reading
It took a few moments to realize what was striking about the opening video for Nvidia’s GTC conference: the complete absence of humans. That the video ended with Jensen Huang, the founder and… | Continue reading
If businesses are subject to Aggregation Theory, then so are ideas: this is the root of the "The Current Thing" meme, and it should drive a re-evaluation of how we think about moderating content on the Internet. | Continue reading
The reaction to the Ukraine invasion has been a demonstration of tech capabilities; those capabilities may be the key to compelling China to pressure Russia. | Continue reading
An interview with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger about IDM 2.0, the acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, and the choices Intel did not make. | Continue reading
Shopify should build an advertising business to complement Shop Pay and the Shopify Fulfillment Network | Continue reading
The advertising has shifted from a Google-Facebook duopoly to one where Amazon and potentially Apple are major forces. | Continue reading
The spate of recent acquisitions in the gaming space — Take Two and Zynga, Microsoft and Activision, and Sony and Bungie — make sense in the context of the Smiling Curve. | Continue reading
It appears that Intel’s partnership with TSMC is much larger than it first seemed; the implications for Intel as whole are massive. | Continue reading
OpenSea is positioned as another Aggregator, which is evidence that Web 3 is a layer on top of the Internet, not a replacement. | Continue reading
The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2021. | Continue reading
Tracing the evolution of tech’s three eras, and why the fourth era — the Metaverse — is defined by its bifurcation with the physical world. | Continue reading