The Best of Benedict Evans

It's never been easier to write or harder to get read. Thoughts on blogging, distribution, platforms and ad-tech

Close to three quarters of all the adults on earth now have a smartphone, and most of the rest will get one in the next few years. However, the use of this connectivity is still only just beginning. Ecommerce is still only a small fraction of retail spending, and many other areas that will be transf

The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?

We all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech…

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’s desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There…

We're now four or five years into the current explosion of machine learning, and pretty much everyone has heard of it, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. I don't think, though, that we yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning -

“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…

«history teaches us nothing except that something will happen.»

Your boss wants a 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?

A big rich company, a company that dominates the market for its product, and a company that dominates the broader tech industry are three quite different things. Market cap isn’t power. IBM ruled…

“Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years. It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile - especially once we reach AR - since you can have it…

For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than…

Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world.

As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?

We regulate lots of industries, from food to banking to airlines, and now, increasingly, we’re going to regulate tech. But that means global platforms collide with local regulators, with complexity,…

I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.

With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.

How do we get beyond 'that's a toy!' and 'but everything looked like a toy!', and try actually to understand whether a new technology might matter? What are valid lines of reasoning, and what statements are 'not even wrong'?

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 is this really advertising, rent,…