The Best of Stratechery

OpenAI’s developer keynote was exciting, both because AI was exciting, and because OpenAI has the potential to be a meaningful consumer tech company.

The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.

Money is made at chokepoints, and the most valuable chokepoints are operating systems; Amazon has built exactly that with Alexa.

What is artificial intelligence? Is it really any different than technology? In my estimation machine learning is truly something new, and the effects on society will be significant.

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.

«This seems very well suited to AI: yes, generation may have marginal costs, but those marginal costs are drastically lower than a human»

Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO’s in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.

Google A/I suggests that AI is a sustaining innovation for all of Big Tech; that means the real battle will be between incumbents and Big Tech on one side, and open source on the other.

Mapping the technology adoption curve to ideas gives insights as to which business models work on which parts of the addressable market.

Dollar Shave Club is a textbook example of how the new Internet economy will destroy value in incumbent industries.

Facebook has long had too much power, but Mark Zuckerberg’s expressed willingness to use said power for political ends means it’s time to consider countermeasures.

Facebook’s reorganization into Meta is the ultimate bet on the power of founder control.

«Meta’s vision, to be clear, is that one ought to be able to access the metaverse from anywhere, including your phone, computer, AR glasses, and of course a VR headset.»

Defining the Metaverse, and explaining why Microsoft is well-placed for the virtual reality opportunity

«A future VR headset, though, could contain as many monitors as you could possibly want — or your entire field of view could be one massive monitor. Moreover, the fact that a headset shifts your senses out of your physical environment is actually an advantage if said physical environment has nothing to do with your work.»

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.

Podcasting is stuck between the open model of the past and the push for monetization in the future. Might there be a third way that actually benefits publishers?

Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator is cannot be when it comes to music.

Spotify has a marginal cost problem, but while the cause is unique to Spotify, the challenges are more applicable than it seems.

The original definition of Aggregation Theory emphasized the importance of commoditized supply; that makes Spotify more of an Aggregator than Netflix

Zero Trust Networking is security with Internet assumptions; there is tremendous value if we apply the same approach to information.

The WeWork IPO is defined by audaciousness and excess, all of which is driven by unlimited access to capital.

Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients.

Twitter has a new policy to listen to experts about what content to limit; what happens, though, when experts are wrong?

Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.

«Electrification of personal vehicles would have happened at some point; it seems fair to argue that Musk accelerated the timeline significantly.»

Tracing the evolution of tech’s three eras, and why the fourth era — the Metaverse — is defined by its bifurcation with the physical world.

«How much better if every account were based on a digital identifier unique to me and owned by no one, and now you understand the case for crypto wallets.»

AI is starting to unbundle the final part of the idea propagation value chain: idea creation and substantiation. The impacts will be far-reaching.

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It’s trivial to say that the Internet changed media; what is more interesting is unpacking how different types of media were affected, and why — and what might happen to TV.