What matters in tech? Newsletter, essays and presentations by Benedict Evans.
Visit ben-evans.com → On Hacker News May 2013 – Sep 2026
Tech Industry & Business 33AI & Machine Learning 7Society, Policy & Culture 5Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experie
What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?
Does Amazon make more money from ads than AWS? Quite possibly.
Everyone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to
Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.
Like Sky before it, Netflix is a television company using tech as a crowbar for market entry. The tech has to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a commodity, and all of the questions that matter are TV questions. The same applies to Tesla, and indeed to many other companies using software to ente
With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?
Smartphones are still evolving, but we're on the upper slopes of the S-Curve. This means innovation is slowing, but also that iOS and Android are now unassailable. It's time to focus on what's next - voice, machine learning and, especially, augmented reality.
When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.
There's a wave of companies trying to find new ways to make software for work, building bundles of workflows and networks that capture the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls of some industry or profession and turn them into structure, automation and time.
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon.
LinkedIn annoys me. It proliferates news aggregation features, and new apps, and all sorts of services. It recently bought an iPad news aggregator, you can use it as a publishing platform and it's spewing out money by selling CVs to recruiters. Reid Hoffman is a genius. But consider som
As machine learning starts working, how does that change Google, Apple and the smartphone interface? What companies get reshaped around machine learning?
It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t
The problem with Amazon is not that it doesn’t make a profit, but that you don’t actually know what the profits are. On the face of it, this sounds like an absurd statement - it doesn’t make any profits. After all, look at this chart - massive revenue growth, zero profit.
Zoom is the Skype of video - it turned a technology few people used much into a mass-market product. But next we’ll get the equivalents of Instagram and Snap - products that ask different questions. Zoom solved getting into a call, but why are you in the call?
Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and atti
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
As cookie-based ads go away, does the targeting move from the cloud to the client, or from the reader to the content? Does this make the strong stronger? Or does the money go to Fedex instead?
What is 5G? Why do we care? How much faster does the pipe get? What can we do with a fatter pipe? How does this relate to VR? Cars? Broadband? What’s the killer app? Really, unless you work in a few very narrow niches, you shouldn’t spend much time thinking about it.
Electric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesti
How do fundamental, structural changes in TV, in retail and in advertising interlock and accelerate each other, and what cascading effects might there be?
The platform wars and over and Apple and Google both won. So, what's the score, how many smartphones and tablet are out there, and what should we think about next?
Car people often look at Tesla the way Nokia looked at the iPhone. “Nice ideas, but we can easily do all of that, and they don’t understand our industry.” Nokia was wrong - but will the car industry look the same? Maybe not.