Benedict Evans' Most Popular Essays

Microsoft and IBM each dominated their generation of tech, and they each lost that dominance, not because of anything they did, nor because of anti-trust, but because the business they controlled stopped being the centre of tech.

We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them

Facebook’s struggle with abusive behavior today looks a lot like Microsoft’s struggles with malware 20 years ago: people take advantage of an open platform, and you have to work out how far you can close the holes, how much you can scan for bad stuff, and whether you need to change the whole

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.

When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!” When car company people look at a Tes

We're now four or five years into the current explosion of machine learning, and pretty much everyone has heard of it, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. I don't think, though, that we yet have a settled sense of quite what machine lea

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? 

Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon. 

People in tech and media have been saying that ‘content is king’ for a long time - perhaps since the VHS/Betamax battle of the early 1980s, and perhaps longer. Content and access to content was a strategic lever for technology. I’m not sure how much this is still true.  Music and books don’t m

What winner-take-all effects could there be in autonomous cars? Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete indefinitely? And for