Benedict joined Mosaic when returning to London after six years working at a16z in San Francisco.
Benedict has spent 20 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. He is now an independent analyst.
Benedict joined Mosaic when returning to London after six years working at a16z in San Francisco.
Benedict has spent 20 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. He is now an independent analyst.
Benedict joined Mosaic when returning to London after six years working at a16z in San Francisco.
Benedict has spent 20 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. He is now an independent analyst.
Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?
Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.
Meta has spent at least $50bn on VR and AR so far, but we’re still in the VR winter: the devices aren’t good enough or cheap enough and the user base is flat. But no matter how good the devices get, how many people will care?
Apple has showed a bunch of cool ideas for generative AI, but much more, it is pointing to most of the big questions and proposing a different answer - that LLMs are commodity infrastructure, not platforms or products.
How do we build mass-market products that change the world around a technology that gets things ‘wrong’? What does wrong mean, and how is that useful?
How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea?
Generative AI means things that were always possible at a small scale now become practical to automate at a massive scale. Sometimes a change in scale is a change in principle.
We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now?
The EU has finally made Apple redesign the App Store, 15 years after we started arguing about it, and no-one is happy with the result. In the next few years there'll be a lot of shouting and some giant fines, but in the end, nothing much will change.
ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software? What are the products?
If you put all the world's knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we've been arguing about for 500 years.
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?
What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.
What does Netflix have in common with Shein, and why is MrBeast more interesting than Disney Plus?
What do the macro shifts in tech have to do with the remake of commerce, and how Generative AI turns the hype cycle?
The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, and where are the humans in the loop?
Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean?
For some companies, revenue is a feature.
The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to regulating competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC’s attempt to block Meta from buying Within is a test case for all of this. So, how many interesting problems can we count?
The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?
Data is the new oil, we are told. Every country needs a data strategy, and all of us should own our data, and be paid for it. But really, there is no such thing as data, it’s not yours, and it’s not worth anything.
Amazon’s ad business is bigger than YouTube and more profitable than AWS. Shein is the biggest fast-fashion retailer in the US, with no stores. US pay TV subscribers have fallen by a third. Where do ad budgets go, where does rent go, and how many brands will there be?
Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.
Exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Three Steps to the Future’.
Email newsletters unlocked a new way to pay for content, but is this a tool or a network? You can write all you like, but how do you get readers? And is the take rate 10% or 90%?
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‘Big tech’ buys hundreds of startups, but what are they, what does that mean for competition, and how does this fit into the broader market? How many more Instagrams are there, and how many DAOs?
‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.
What does a mailbox with 351 thousand unread emails say about Bauhaus, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Metaverse?
In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships - and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strategic roadmap. It also likes lecturing its peers. But is there another Jesusphone?
‘Digital transformation’ sounds like a parody of meaningless tech marketing, but actually captures some pretty interesting and important shifts in big company tech. It’s not as exciting as crypto or AR, and it takes a decade or two, but it’s just as big as smartphones.
Privacy is coming to the internet and cookies are going away. This is long overdue - but we don’t know what happens next, we don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition.
We’ve been arguing about Apple’s app store rules for a decade now, but whatever your opinion of them, it should now be clear that something is going to change.
Late last year the US congress's antitrust committee held a series of hearings, and produced a 400 page report, on competition issues around big tech platforms. The report, co-authored by the new FTC nominee Lina Khan, essentially claimed that these companies are collectively the new Standard Oil, crushin
The traditional way to think about ecommerce penetration is to look at share of total retail sales, and then deduct things like car repair, gasoline and restaurants - to get to ‘addressable retail’.
We’re now a couple of weeks into Apple’s latest iOS privacy move. If you want to track users between apps and the web, or from an ad through the app store to an install, then you need to ask permission, and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes.
Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company. iPods were a much bigger business than the Mac, and they also made Apple a dominant force in the music industry.
Of Amazon’s top 50 best-sellers in “Children's Vaccination & Immunisation”, close to 20 are by anti-vaccine polemicists, and 5 are novels about fictional pandemics. This poses two questions
Apple launched the App Store in 2008, and tightened up the payment rules in 2011, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since. In many ways the issues haven’t really changed - it’s just that the numbers got a lot bigger.
Exchange and commerce platforms – and the tooling that comes with them – are having a moment. Hundreds of new marketplaces are being launched each month, leveraging new technology to supercharge supply and demand across sectors and geographies.
The recent lockdowns led to a forced adoption and forced experiment, and a lot of future growth was pulled forward into a couple of quarters. The UK had a much more rigorous lockdown than the USA, and it had a much larger increase in e-commerce adoption.
In the late 1990s, Microsoft was the evil empire, and a big part of ‘evil’ was that it was too closed - it made things too hard for developers. But then came the great malware explosion
Amazon is a big and very aggressive company, that’s radically changing how retailing works, and that attracts a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism. Some of this is entirely justified. However, there’s one strand of criticism that fascinates me because it attacks Amazon for something that’s been part of retail for 150 years - the private label business.
#Cryptocurrencies are crossing the chasm. Meaningful adoption from companies like @PayPal, @ChristiesInc and @MorganStanley mean there’s now no going back.
When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.
There’s an old and common narrative around Amazon that it doesn’t make money, it sells below cost, it’s subsidised by investors and in particular it’s subsidised by AWS. People tend to repeat these to each other as though they’re unquestionable true, but they’re either debatable or objectively false.
I generally think about retail as sitting on a spectrum from logistics to experience. At the logistics end, you know exactly what you want and retail’s job is to provide the most efficient way to get it. At the experience end, you don’t know, and retail’s job is to help you, with ideas, suggestion, curation and service.
Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.
COVID, China, regulation.. tech is becoming a regulated industry, but what does that actually mean? How will tech look like when entering its second 50 years?
Facebook has close to 2bn users, posting over 100bn things each day. The global SMS system, at its peak, had 20-25bn messages a day.
Anyone will do anything online, and a whole wave of companies is being created to take advantage of that, even, yes, in Europe.
In the 1980s, if you installed a word processor or spreadsheet program on your PC, they wouldn’t come with word counts, footnotes or charts. You couldn’t put a comment in a cell. You couldn’t even print in landscape. Those were all separate products from separate companies that you’d have to go out and buy for $50 or $100 each.
Lockdowns triggered a huge spike in online sales of every kind, will this stabilise - once things calm down, where will the new level be set? Our Venture Partner Ben Evans looks into it.
One of the basic building blocks of any competition case is market definition
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at ecommerce and discovery - how do people decide what to buy online, when a shop can’t show it to them? It seems to me that pretty much every part of that question is being reset this year
People argue about Amazon a lot, and one of the most common and long-running arguments is about profits. The sales keep going up, and it takes a larger and larger share of US retail every year (7-8% in 2019), but it never seems to make any money. What’s going on?
It took 75 years for seatbelts to become compulsory, but tech has gone from interesting to crucial only in the last five to ten years. That speed means we have to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand quite so well as, say, supermarkets.
We all, I think, understand that the iPhone was a generational change in computing, but that change came in two parts. The multitouch interface is obvious, but the change in the software model was just as important. Apple changed how software development worked, and by doing so expanded the number of people who could comfortably, safely use a computer from a few hundred million to a few billion.
Both the UK and (today) the USA have given official statistics on how ecommerce and retail have changed during lockdown. The headline numbers are pretty dramatic. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%.
We’re clearly going to be arguing about the size, power and market share of large technology companies a great deal in the next couple of years
We've heard a lot about "the new normal" but what does that mean for tech?
We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off..
There are two ways you can talk about newspapers. You can talk about the ‘fourth estate’, and newspapers’ role in culture, politics, governance, the exchange of ideas and civil society. But you can also talk about newspapers as a specialised light manufacturing industry, that aggregated attention to sell advertising.
Online events remind me a lot of ecommerce in about 1996. The software is raw and rough around the edges, and often doesn’t work very well, though that can get fixed. But more importantly, no-one quite knows what they should be building.
‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’ is a great catch phrase, and it’s also a great way to describe a whole class of product and a whole class of startup.
A lot of really important technologies started out looking like expensive, impractical toys.
We tried VR in the 1980s, and it didn’t work. The idea may have been great, but the technology of the day was nowhere close to delivering it, and almost everyone forgot about it. Then, in 2012, we realised that this might work now.
You might call this the Wile E Coyote effect - you’ve run off the cliff, or the cliff has disappeared from under you, but there’s a brief moment while your legs windmill in the air before gravity kicks in. It can take a while for the inevitable to happen, but then, as Lenin pointed out, you get a decade of inevitable in a week.
In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA began in a smartphone app. By 2019 that was probably closer to 50%.
When Steve Wozniak created the original Apple I in 1975, IBM dominated the computing industry. It was nicknamed ‘Big Blue’, it was so far ahead of its competitors that people talked about ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’, and it had just come through yet another anti-trust case.
