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
20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
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