The Latest
For two decades, vertical integration was the whole strategy — hardware, OS, app store, payments, and search reinforcing each other. The DMA is an attempt to reverse-engineer that, and the platforms are already relocating the moat somewhere harder to regulate.
AI has compressed pharmaceutical discovery from years to months. The clinical trial gauntlet still runs at the pace of human biology — and that gap is where most of the investment risk lives.
The demos were convincing. The deployments are real. But the unit economics of replacing human workers with walking machines are still being written in real time, and the answers so far are humbling.
Every platform origin story gets told as a technology story. It isn't one. What let Uber out-scale every taxi fleet and Airbnb out-room every hotel chain wasn't an app. It was refusing to own anything.
