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Platformonomics TGIF #121: March 27, 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 Service has resumed. News UnfocusedAI Strategy Du Jour: “We’re an Enterprise Company!” To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the enterprise with the team you hired from…
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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…
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Mind the Bathwater
The unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Grokster bodes mighty poorly for companies whose primary purpose is to facilitate music piracy through peer-to-peer file sharing. My out-on-a-limb investment advice: this might not be the best place for your retirement nest egg. Getting paid to propagate spyware while encouraging people to pirate music never was a great…