A quarter century after ‘don't be evil’ a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter? | Continue reading
Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they … | Continue reading
Meta has spent at least $50bn on VR and AR so far, but we’re still in the VR winter: the devices aren’t good enough or cheap enough and the user base is flat. But no matter how good the devices get, how many people will care? | Continue reading
Apple has showed a bunch of cool ideas for generative AI, but much more, it is pointing to most of the big questions and proposing a different answer - that LLMs are commodity infrastructure, not platforms. | Continue reading
How do we build mass-market products that change the world around a technology that gets things ‘wrong’? What does wrong mean, and how is that useful? | Continue reading
How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea? | Continue reading
Generative AI means things that were always possible at a small scale now become practical to automate at a massive scale. Sometimes a change in scale is a change in principle. | Continue reading
We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around … | Continue reading
Should you try to write laws, or lay down ethical principles, about a technology that will be used in entirely different ways, for different purposes, in different industries? How about if it’s changing entirely every 18 months? | Continue reading
Tech regulation gets a lot of headlines, and seems like a big deal, but most people in tech don’t seem to care much. It’s boring, and years away, but more fundamentally, it really doesn’t affect what people spend their time working on. | Continue reading
The Vision Pro is amazing, but like the rest of VR and AR, Apple seems years away from the mass market. And if it gets there, how much will it matter? | Continue reading
The EU has finally made Apple redesign the App Store, 15 years after we started arguing about it, and no-one is happy with the result. In the next few years there’ll be a lot of shouting and some giant fines, but in the end, nothing much will change. | Continue reading
I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future | Continue reading
ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything, so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software? | Continue reading
If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a complete new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years. | Continue reading
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’ | Continue reading
ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption? | Continue reading
What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025. | Continue reading
What does Netflix have in common with Shein, and why is MrBeast more interesting than Disney Plus? | Continue reading
Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But are these really ads, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google? | Continue reading
The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, and where are the humans in the loop? | Continue reading
Your boss wants an metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict? | Continue reading
For some companies, revenue is a feature. | Continue reading
The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to regulating competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC ‘s attempt to block Meta from buying Within is a test case for all of this. So, how many interesting problems can we count? | Continue reading
The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration? | Continue reading
Data is the now oil, we are told. Every country needs a data strategy, and all of us should own our data, and be paid for it. But really, there is no such thing as data, it’s not yours, and it’s not worth anything. | Continue reading
Is there any company more successful at controlling the public narrative than Amazon? Nothing it cares about ever leaks. Almost all of the press coverage, even and especially the negative stories, runs to a script that Bezos could have written - "We do amazing things to get low … | Continue reading
Amazon’s ad business is bigger than YouTube and more profitable than AWS. Shein is the biggest fast-fashion retailer in the US, with no stores. US pay TV subscribers have fallen by a third. Where do ad budgets go, where does rent go, and how many brands will there be? | Continue reading
Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others. | Continue reading
Presentations by Benedict Evans | Continue reading
Email newsletters unlocked a new way to pay for content, but is this a tool or a network? You can write all you like, but how do you get readers? And is the take rate 10% or 90%? | Continue reading
‘Big tech’ buys hundreds of startups, but what are they, what does that mean for competition, and how does this fit into the broader market? How many more Instagrams are there, and how many DAOs? | Continue reading
Has Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook, or rebranded VR? What is the metaverse? And can any company decide to build the future anymore? | Continue reading
What does a mailbox with 351 thousand unread emails say about Bauhaus, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Metaverse? | Continue reading
“Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of … | Continue reading
In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships - and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strate … | Continue reading
‘Digital transformation’ sounds like a parody of meaningless tech marketing, but actually captures some pretty interesting and important shifts in big company tech. It’s not as exciting as crypto or AR, and it takes a decade or two, but it’s just as big as smartphones. | Continue reading
Privacy is coming to the internet and cookies are going away. This is long overdue - but we don’t know what happens next, we don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition. | Continue reading
After a decade of arguing, regulators will change Apple’s App Store rules. How much money are we talking about, what might happen next and, most importantly, who cares? This is a big deal for Spotify, but does it matter to anyone else? | Continue reading
"You give me the awful impression, I hate to have to say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever." - Christopher Hitchens Late last year the US congress's antitrust committee held a series of hearings, and produced a 400 page report, on … | Continue reading
Should we still be talking about online and offline retail, or about trucks versus boxes versus bikes? | Continue reading
We’re now a couple of weeks into Apple’s latest iOS privacy move. If you want to track users between apps and the web, or from an ad through the app store to an install, then you need to ask permission and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will sa … | Continue reading
20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at … | Continue reading
Amazon has been able to scale indefinitely because it treats every product as an interchangeable packet, and doesn’t need to know what they are, only what they weigh. But if it doesn’t know what it sells, that’s only half a retailer. And what would happen if it could change that? | Continue reading
We’ve been arguing about app stores for a decade, but now the EU is going to change the rules. Will that actually matter, or is it just a $10bn wealth transfer to a few games companies? | Continue reading
As we come out of lockdown, UK ecommerce penetration is 50% higher than the USA. What does that do to retail, and to startups, if it sticks? | Continue reading
Facebook struggles with harmful content just as Microsoft struggled with malware 20 years ago. Content moderation is the new virus scanning. But virus scanning wasn’t the answer - instead we changed the whole model, moving to mobile and the cloud, and leaving Microsoft behind. So … | Continue reading