Evans: Tech markets consolidate via S-curves where incremental improvements cannot win
Benedict Evans · No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A · Dec 11, 2022 · at 31:35
Independent tech analyst Benedict Evans explains how tech market cycles evolve from open competition to winner-take-all consolidation.
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“The competitive threat in tech is generally not someone doing the same thing as you, but better. Or let me kind of qualify that. Each market sort of goes for an S-curve, and there's like an early period where everyone's fighting it out to win. So this is like the, at the time when there were 10 different PC productivity suites, you know, 10 different wordpresses and 10 different spreadsheets. At one point, Boeing was selling a spreadsheet, just to give you an illustration of how wide open this market was. And then there's a period when, like, it's consolidated down, and there's one or two players, and the network effects are when winner-takes-all effects really kick in. And then it's too late, and you can't break in with a slightly better version of the same product.”
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