flâneur

Bending the barbell of value accrual

x.com · 1,120 words · saved by 1 readers

https://t.co/pKbztmfQ0X

During the early and middle stages of a platform shift, there's money to be made at every layer of the stack. Generally though, as the cycle matures, value distribution reveals itself to be barbelled towards the bottom (e.g., semis) and the top (e.g., applications). This is well understood but mostly easily exemplified by the PC era, during which the lion’s share of economic surplus went to the applications that ran on top of Windows (e.g., Office, Adobe, enterprise software) rather than to the OS itself. Microsoft’s durability came from its developer flywheel, which then kept the middle…

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