Stratechery.com Website Review

On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. Menu Posted onTuesday, September 3, 2019Wednesday, September 4, 2019 At first glance, WeWork and Peloton, which both released their S-1s in recent weeks, don’t have much in common: one company rents empty buildings and converts them into office space, and the other sells home fitness equipment and streaming clas*es. Both, though, have Of course, it is fair to ask, “What isn’t a tech company?” Surely that is the endpoint of software eating the world utilizes software is just as unhelpful today as it would have been decades ago. Fifty years ago, what is a tech company was an easy question to answer: IBM was the tech company, and everybody else was IBM’s including the operating system and applications, and provided services, including training, ongoing maintenance, and custom All kinds of industries benefited from IBM’s technology, including financial services, large manufacturers, retailers, etc., and, of course, the military. Functions like accounting, resource management, and record-keeping automated and centralized activities that used to be done by hand, dramatically increasing the efficiency of existing activities and making new kinds of activities possible. Increased efficiency and new business opportunities, though, didn’t make J.P. Morgan or General Electric or Sears tech companies. Technology simply became one piece of a greater whole. Yes, it was essential, but that essentialness exposed technology’s ban*lity: IBM, though, was different: every part of the company was about technology — indeed, IBM was an entire ecosystem onto itself: hardware, software, and services, all tied together with a subscription payment model strikingly similar to today’s dominant software-as-a-service approach. In short, being a tech company meant being IBM, which meant creating and participating in an ecosystem The story of IBM handing Microsoft the contract for the PC operating system and, by extension, the dominant position in computing for the