Posts tagged "Competitive Strategy"

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AI Commoditization and Three Strategic Paths

4 min read

AI is commoditizing your competitive advantage. Three strategic paths exist: race to the top, bottom, or adjacent. Choose deliberately or fail.

AI makes your differentiator table stakes. Your competitive advantage is evaporating. The junior employee with AI tools matches the senior expert's output. The expertise that took years to build becomes a commodity. What do you do when your moat becomes a puddle? The framework Three strategic paths exist. Each works. Each requires different capabilities. Race to the top: Invest in capabilities AI can't commoditize. This works when you can build compounding advantages, such as proprietary...
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ChatGPT Is Becoming the Interface

3 min read

Sam Altman outlines how OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into the internet’s next interface, powered by apps, commerce, and global infrastructure growth.

When Sam Altman spoke with Stratechery this week, one idea stood out from the flurry of announcements and partnerships. OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be the single interface that connects people to everything else they do online. Altman described a clear vision. OpenAI aims to build one capable system that people can use across their entire lives, from work to learning to entertainment. That mission explains the company’s focus on three fronts: research, product, and infrastructure....
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From Competitive Moats to Collaborative Bridges

3 min read

In the AI era, the strongest products don’t build walls — they build bridges. Here’s why connectivity, not isolation, defines modern defensibility.

The AI ecosystem is moving too fast for moats. Every closed advantage leaks. Every walled garden gets mapped. What used to protect you now isolates you. The defensible position today isn’t the highest wall — it’s the bridge everyone else depends on to cross. For years, defensibility meant isolation. Own the data. Control the stack. Lock down the ecosystem. Those strategies worked when products were discrete and distribution was finite. You could draw boundaries around...
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The Massive AI Opportunity Hiding on Your Home Screen

7 min read

Most 'AI products' aren't AI-native. Use the Home Screen Test to spot the billion-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Right now, stop reading and look at your phone's home screen. Count how many apps are built specifically for AI—not regular apps that added AI features, but products designed from the ground up for the AI era. ChatGPT probably makes the list. Maybe a few others. But for most of us, the answer is surprisingly close to zero. This observation comes from Andrew Chen's recent piece on how AI will change startup building, where he...
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Atlassian's Browser Move

3 min read

Atlassian’s $610M bet on The Browser Company is bold. Here’s why it makes sense, and the big risks that could derail it.

Atlassian, the company behind Jira and Confluence, is spending $610 million to acquire The Browser Company, the maker of Arc and the newer AI-forward browser, Dia. That sounds strange at first. Atlassian makes collaboration software, not browsers. Chrome and Edge dominate the market. Why on earth would they want to own a browser? But once you look closer, it starts to make sense. The browser as a starting point Brian Balfour puts it well in...
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Apple’s Sugar Water Trap

4 min read

Apple’s iPhone 17 shows the sugar water trap risk as AI reshapes tech. A lesson for product managers on balancing incremental progress with bold bets.

Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” That question pushed Sculley to leave Pepsi for Apple, and it has lingered ever since as a reminder of the difference between comfortable success and transformative ambition. The launch of the iPhone 17 makes the metaphor newly relevant. On paper, Apple delivered a strong upgrade: a Promotion display...
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GTM Playbook for Feature Products in the Platform and AI Era

9 min read

A GTM playbook for feature products competing with platforms in the AI era, focused on delight, speed, and switching costs before the bundle arrives.

Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Dropbox and Google Drive. The pattern is not about who shipped first or who had the clever feature. The pattern is that platforms with native distribution absorb features, then win on adoption. In 2025, AI accelerates that cycle. Features can be cloned in months, not years, and updates land on millions of seats overnight. This is not a reason to stop innovating. It is a call to...
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The Token Squeeze is Real

3 min read

AI isn’t getting cheaper. Token demand is exploding, and flat-rate subscriptions are doomed. What pricing models can survive the squeeze?

AI should feel like it's getting cheaper. After all, compute costs fall, models get optimized, and every year brings new claims of a 10x drop in inference prices. But as Ethan Ding argues in Tokens Are Getting More Expensive, the opposite is true: the economics of AI subscriptions are in a squeeze. Ding’s Core Argument The paradox is simple. While yesterday’s models do get cheaper, users don’t want them. Demand instantly shifts to the latest...
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Nano Banana and the Future of AI Image Editing

4 min read

Google’s Nano Banana is redefining AI image editing. Here’s what it means for creativity, platforms, and trust in the digital age.

When Google teased three bananas in a post from CEO Sundar Pichai, the internet buzzed with curiosity. The reveal—Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), a new AI image editing model. It was more than a quirky codename. It signals a shift in how we think about digital creativity. Unlike earlier AI tools that struggled to maintain consistency or required heavy post-editing, Nano Banana delivers precise, natural-language edits while keeping subjects unmistakably themselves. This is...
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What Makes a Real Data Moat

4 min read

Data moats are the key to AI defensibility. Tesla and Stripe show what makes them real and how product teams can build them.

The age of generative AI has created a strange paradox. On one hand, anyone can plug into models like GPT and build features quickly. On the other hand, defensibility has never been more elusive. If everyone has access to the same foundation models, what stops a competitor from copying your product? The strongest answer is the data moat. Done right, it’s the most durable form of AI advantage a company can build. Done wrong, it’s...
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AI Risks to SaaS Companies

3 min read

Generative + Agentic AI is accelerating feature commoditization; read the room and adapt.

The press around AI putting pressure on well-established SaaS companies is gaining some momentum. Note: We are not discussing specific stocks and valuations. Our focus is on the impact of AI on software companies. Analyst Ratings Published 08/11/2025… "Melius Research downgraded Adobe… warns of ongoing multiple compression for software-as-a-service companies… ‘AI is eating software’ …” AI isn’t a shiny add-on anymore. It’s like a sneaky wave that’s pushing SaaS valuations lower. Investors see that and...
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The Power of an Anchor - Warby Parker's Pricing Strategy

3 min read

Warby Parker's playbook for product managers. Learn how the company uses pricing strategy, vertical integration, and innovation to grow.

From WSJ piece on Warby Parker: >Many things have gotten pricier in the past 15 years. Not Warby Parker's most affordable glasses, which have cost $95 since the brand’s inception in 2010. Warby Parker grew 14% last year. It did this while keeping its hero $95 price point. This shows that a focused value proposition can thrive even with inflation. The company used a few key strategies. It controlled its supply chain. It created a...
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