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Platformonomics TGIF #114: January 30, 2026
Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email It’s that most magical time of the year: HyperCAPEX season! Meta and Microsoft are in; Amazon and Google report next week. Full annual retrospective to follow (last…
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Why X Doesn’t Matter
One of the many things low on my to-do list (right down there with blogging more often) is to do more to promote the gospel and reasoning of Nick “IT Doesn’t Matter” Carr (he uses the less definitive “Does IT Matter?” when trying to sell books to swing audiences). His argument is that since technology…
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Utility Computing or Futility Computing?
Perhaps the network is not in fact the computer. The Register reports that after 14 months Sun still doesn’t have any customers for their $1/CPU/hour computing service. It is easy to pick on Sun, but they’ve made the same fundamental error that everyone touting utility, grid, on demand and other flavors of buzzword computing…
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The Gilder Fallacy
Rich Karlgaard at Forbes has a recurring meme he calls the Cheap Revolution to explain the impact of increasing technological abundance. He revisits it again in the latest issue of Forbes: “The Cheap Revolution rolls on, making new billionaires even as it collects more old scalps each year. Step back and look at what’s…
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From Browse to Search to Subscribe Revisited
Dave Winer contemplates browse -> search -> subscribe and finds inspiration. However, the fact that the t-shirt was more effective than the blog at propogating the meme doesn’t exactly motivate more frequent postings on my part.
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The Power of Ecosystems
A nice piece in Fast Company by John Sviokla on the power of ecosystems. The interesting question is whether you can plausibly make the transition from a closed/vertical industry model to an ecosystem/horizontal industry model. It is hard to think of examples of companies successfully making that transition (got any candidates?). The revenue hit when…