Understanding how data moats form isn't about mourning losses. It's about identifying which markets still have open windows… and which battles aren't worth fighting. We call it "network effects." But that's wrong. The network isn't the moat. The

Every few years, someone declares a revolution. Vinyl records became 8-track tapes became cassettes became CDs became MP3 downloads became streaming services. Six complete transformations in music distribution. Six infrastructure overhauls. Each one celebrated as revolutionary. Watch what changed: Physical warehouses became digital servers. Trucks delivering crates became data packets.

You're not addicted to instant gratification. You've been conditioned by irreversible infrastructure shifts. My mom bought us encyclopedias. Heavy volumes, gold-trimmed pages. When I needed information, I walked to the shelf. Found the right letter. Turned pages. Sometimes the answer wasn't there. Then I

Twitter launched in 2006 with a 140-character limit borrowed from SMS. The constraint was technical, not philosophical. Users invented threading. By 2013, tweetstorms appeared: numbered tweets (1/12, 2/12, 3/12) manually posted in sequence. No native feature existed. People just started doing it. Then screenshots of text. Users

What happens when your hammer starts building better hammers at 3am while you sleep? Microsoft's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman revealed something everyone's missing: AI isn't just good at answering questions. It's phenomenal at two civilization-defining things: Writing code and using tools. (Yes,

Slack was supposed to save us from email. Instead, it broke our focus. Email had boundaries—you checked it, then left. Slack has none—it pings every 6 minutes. That's 80+ interruptions a day. It takes 23 minutes to refocus after each one. Do the math: deep work

There's a marketing campaign running right now that's about to backfire spectacularly. And the team who created it has no idea. Complex systems produce behaviors none of their parts intended. Your campaigns interact in ways you never designed. Messages combine, recombine, and impact your customers in

AI training reshapes us. When OpenAI's thumbs-up system transformed GPT-4o into a sycophant, it exposed our evaluation blind spot. We consistently measure comfort over utility. The AI praised terrible ideas ("selling feces on sticks") because users rewarded flattery over honesty. Does this pattern sound familiar? Even