Tech strategy and platform economics

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

Economics for information goods: pricing, versioning, lock-in and network effects.

How multi-sided platforms such as card networks get both sides on board at once.

How platforms create value by matching groups, unlike linear pipeline businesses.

How to invest in tech stocks by backing the gorilla that wins each market.

A theory of modularity in design, applied to the history of the computer industry.

Treat patents as financial and strategic assets, not legal defences.

Run a tech company for shareholder value by funding its core advantage.

The internet stock bubble from Netscape's 1995 listing to the crash.

How Intel and others became and stayed leaders of technology platforms.

How 1980s changes turned the US patent system from aid to obstacle for innovation.

Software platforms as two-sided markets, and how they price and grow.

Without shelf limits, sales of many niche products add up to rival the hits.

How Israel, Taiwan and Ireland each used the state to build IT industries.

Computing is becoming a utility supplied over a network, as electricity did.

Digital costs near zero mean goods can be given away, which changes whole industries.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

How government decisions and monopolies left US internet access slow and costly.

How the mp3, a CD-factory leaker and pirate websites broke the music business.

The hidden on-demand workers who make automated online services work.

Innovation platforms and transaction platforms, and what each needs to succeed.

How to launch a network product that is worthless until enough people use it.

Written before the crash, naming Yahoo among the overvalued.

Early and prescient case that access would displace ownership.

How the TRIPS treaty spread patent and copyright rents worldwide, drugs included.

The telecom capex bubble, with Ebbers and WorldCom at its centre.

Evidence that patents work poorly as property; the IP-as-asset skeptic case.

How Microsoft turned patents from lawsuits into a licensing business.

The maths of pay-per-use versus owned capacity.

The arithmetic of conversion rates, whales and lifetime value.

Designing the interaction that a platform is actually built around.

The critical case: platform power, housing supply and regulatory arbitrage.

Practitioner account of how platform businesses capture a transaction.

Data economics of the shift from studios to streamers.

How licensing in place of sale strips buyers of control over what they paid for.

Economics of trust and matching that make marketplaces like Airbnb work.

The revival of co-operatives and member ownership, online platforms included.

Why America lags in fibre-optic broadband, and the case against the cable incumbents.

The gig-work model Uber's unit economics depend on.

The gig economy's promises and realities, and the law on classifying its workers.

The sceptical case: the tech sector is an enclave, not an economy.

The case that blockchain architectures displace the centralised web

Field research on algorithmic management of drivers.

The case that programmatic advertising is a mispriced market.

How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.

Bootstrapped SaaS economics: pricing, churn, plateau.

A report on competition in the telephone industry.

How firms must use real-time information to serve never-satisfied customers.

How firms can build value and competitive advantage from online virtual communities.

Bandwidth-abundance thesis; useful as a period document of the bubble.

Five technological revolutions since 1771, and why each brings a financial bubble.

Case studies of Israeli technologies and how they were commercialised.

The geography and licensing limits of streaming television around the world.