“During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn’t yet adequate to meet customer needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution — because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem.”
I wonder if Thesis #1 ought to be generalized to "picking the right horse to ride" as it needs to consider and reconsider periodically the current market dynamics. Would James Hamilton still pick ARM as his horse today in 2022? According to https://wccftech.com/x86-arm-rival-risc-v-architecture-ships-10-billion-cores/, RISC-V took only 12 years to reach 10 billion cores shipped as opposed to ARM which took 17 years. It is now projected to reach 80 billion cores in just 3 years! And it comes without any licensing/royalty encumbrances of ARM.
This is case-study worthy material! well written, Pushkar. The entire reasoning of this narrative carries through without guff! This is a case study of how business strategy ends up being written in silicon. ANd the world is certainly moving to civil law perhaps also being written in silicon (to codify and limit and lock it down without alteration), banking moving to silicon chips, and so on!
I wonder if Thesis #1 ought to be generalized to "picking the right horse to ride" as it needs to consider and reconsider periodically the current market dynamics. Would James Hamilton still pick ARM as his horse today in 2022? According to https://wccftech.com/x86-arm-rival-risc-v-architecture-ships-10-billion-cores/, RISC-V took only 12 years to reach 10 billion cores shipped as opposed to ARM which took 17 years. It is now projected to reach 80 billion cores in just 3 years! And it comes without any licensing/royalty encumbrances of ARM.
Good stuff, hope you write more often!
This is case-study worthy material! well written, Pushkar. The entire reasoning of this narrative carries through without guff! This is a case study of how business strategy ends up being written in silicon. ANd the world is certainly moving to civil law perhaps also being written in silicon (to codify and limit and lock it down without alteration), banking moving to silicon chips, and so on!