The Best of Benedict Evans
10+ most popular Benedict Evans articles, as voted by our community.
Trying to work out what's going on, and what happens next. Mostly tech.
Benedict Evans on Blogging
Platforms, distribution and audience — Benedict Evans
It's never been easier to write or harder to get read. Thoughts on blogging, distribution, platforms and ad-tech
Benedict Evans on Ecommerce
The end of the beginning
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
Back to the trend line? — Benedict Evans
The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?
Benedict Evans on Gadgets
The scale of tech winners
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…
Benedict Evans on Jeff Bezos
Amazon as experiment
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…
Benedict Evans on Machine Learning
Ways to think about machine learning
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 -
Benedict Evans on Metaverse
Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans
“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.»
Ways to think about a metaverse — Benedict Evans
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?
Benedict Evans on Microsoft
How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust
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…
Benedict Evans on Technology
The VR winter — Benedict Evans
“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…
Benedict Evans on USA
The end of the American internet — Benedict Evans
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…
Benedict Evans on Venture Capital
Presentations — Benedict Evans
Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world.
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?
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
Regulating technology — Benedict Evans
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,…
COVID and cascading collapses — Benedict Evans
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.
Asking the wrong questions
With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.
Not even wrong - ways to dismiss technology
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'?
Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business — Benedict Evans
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,…
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