← All creators
B
Ben Thompson
2 recommended products
Everything Ben personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
Warned against
PlayStation 3
negative
"The PlayStation 3 was Sony's big misstep in terms of the whole PlayStation era. They had this crazy processor called the Cell processor. The PlayStation 3 was way too expensive, ran super hot, and all these extra capabilities were not used."
Xbox
negative
"The Xbox, the way I think about it — and a lot of gamers kind of get annoyed when I write about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the game part of it, I'm more interested in the strategy and how that fits in the overall company. What is your review? This is a strategy that totally failed."
Xbox Game Pass
negative
"This is where we sort of get to the Game Pass disaster. Microsoft decides we're going to do Xbox Game Pass — instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games in Game Pass. The problem is no independent developer was going to go for that."
Xbox One
negative
"They come out after that with the Xbox One, which was super expensive because it had the Kinect built in — that wave your hands around sort of thing. And it had more restrictive DRM things. Gamers hated it. So they rejected it."
Created by Ben:
Stratechery
Recent episodes
All →Showing 54 of 55 products
Clear filtersMentioned in 1 episode
"I was talking about my rack on Sharp Tech. Lots of compliments. Many people told me nice rack. It was great."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I worked for Automattic way back when when I moved to Taiwan and they've always been sort of distributed and developed lots of processes and ways to work around that."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"TSMC is arguably worse because there's only one. There's one company on the leading edge. What I think a lot of the tech companies didn't fully appreciate is the extent to which TSMC has offloaded risk onto the big tech companies."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Dropbox — unbelievable product. Especially when it first came out in business school, I was one of the first people to use Dropbox and that went off like crazy. I have so much storage still on my free Dropbox because I gave out my referral code to so many people."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly on the frontier. They're the religious organizations in Silicon Valley — Anthropic is like they're all in, it is core their belief."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The marginal cost question for the different user — the user using free ChatGPT and the user trying to solve a math theorem — they're not even remotely in the same universe."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"From a tactical perspective, I love the Cursor acquisition. That makes so much sense for both companies, and so I'm intrigued to see what they do."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"AWS is the most obvious example. AWS contrary to sort of popular thought was not spare Amazon capacity. It took a long time to get amazon.com onto AWS. But what it drove was the understanding that we need to have scalable compute you can plug in purely via API surface."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Oracle went to market in the '80s with relational databases, saying you don't want to be locked into IBM — come with us. The reason this is a joke is because Oracle locks you in more than anyone."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"There's a reason they're using Google Cloud and Nvidia chips, but you can certainly imagine a future where that's the case and they're in physical goods."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Nvidia's position is, I think, definitely unnatural. They've maintained all their margins — isn't that amazing? It's 2026 and everyone's coming for them and they're still charging however much money for a chip. But they're actually not maintaining their margins because of who is buying."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"When you see Codex or when you see Claude Code or whatever it is — like aimed like an arrow to the heart of what Microsoft has."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The answer is always Amazon. What Amazon is so compelling is the extent to which they build for themselves first. They are their first best customer — they provide the scale to get basically anything off the ground, which they then sell to other people. Their core business feels so impervious to AI. Their moat feels deeper than anyone, and their ability to just sort of generate new business lines organically is very compelling."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Grok and Meta are chasing them. Meanwhile, the Chinese are very capable, very smart, and also definitely distilling these models to sort of stay about 6 to 9 months behind."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Netflix has to pay upfront for content and then ideally make more money. YouTube pays along the way. Netflix — this is their problem with the subscription plan — they have to think about how much can they raise prices before consumers rebel."
"It could be worse — you could be Netflix and have the stock market make a bid for Warner Brothers that the stock market hates, abandon the deal, but they already decided you did the deal because you're desperate."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly on the frontier. Who knows what's happening with Google, and then Grok and Meta are chasing them."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Microsoft recently shifted their enterprise plan. They came out with an E7 plan — $100 per user per month — that includes some amount of usage, but then they're also charging for usage on top of that."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Meta killed Snapchat or stopped Snapchat's growth by realizing Snapchat has a great product — let's layer it onto our network. They brought their network to bear to kill Snapchat."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"CUDA's moat is dramatically diminished because the models don't care what they run on — and that's what actually matters, what's built on top of the models. But it still matters. It's still something of a moat."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Finally getting a Siri that works — you can see a future where this absolutely can work on device and they actually don't even need to pay for inference costs either."
2 recommended · 0 sponsored · 4 warned against · 0 episodes