Evans: Network effects do not translate to building smartphone hardware
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Mobile is Eating the World (and Apple is Gobbling Fastest) · Jan 2, 2019 · at 12:57
a16z tech analyst Benedict Evans analyzes why initiatives like Facebook Home and Amazon's Fire Phone failed to gain traction.
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“In a funny sort of sense, it's like you could be too far up the stack to do this, just as you could be too far down the stack to do this. So just as it doesn't really make sense for a mobile operator or a handset maker to try and build a social network, it doesn't necessarily make sense for a social network to try and build a phone. Because that's not really where the network effects sit, and they don't really have the right kind of position in the value chain to do that.”
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