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Platform Power Is Underrated – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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In 2015, Felix Salmon wrote about The Ingredients of a Great Newsletter, and used yours truly as an example. While that page no longer exists, the annotations Salmon made to my February 5, 2015 Update are still on Genius. The first thing you might notice is that while the Update was from 2015, I had the wrong year in my email; I guess the positive spin is that that was due to the duct-tape-and-wire nature of my publishing system back then, but it was an embarrassing enough error that I never did link to Salmon’s piece. The reason I mention it now, however, is that while Salmon had positive thing to say about my coverage of net neutrality and Microsoft’s then-new Outlook app, he was mostly bemused by my coverage of the App Store: Thompson is proud to have obsessions, and one of his geeky obsessions is the arcane set of rules surrounding apps in Apple’s app store. His conclusion is also a way of continuing a thread which runs through many past and future updates: as such it’s a way of re

Platform Power Is Underrated – Stratechery by Ben Thompson Skip to content Platform Power Is Underrated Monday, May 5, 2025 Listen to Podcast Watch on YouTube Listen to this post : Log in to listen I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. — Lord Acton,

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