There are several types of network effect that should be properly understood:

• Direct network effects: they occur when the number of users has a direct impact on the value of a product.
• Indirect network effects: they occur in two-sided (or multi...

Switching costs describe how difficult or expensive it is for a user to switch from one product to another.

Multihoming costs explain how easy or likely it is to use multiple competing networks simultaneously.

In general, the higher t...

The world’s most successful companies all exhibit some form of structural competitive advantage: A defensibility mechanism that protects their margins and profits from competitors over long periods of time.

If you want to understand the power dynamics between different platforms, aggregators and other players in a tech ecosystem, it’s better to look at them as a vertical stack with different layers.

On each layer of the stack, companies are trying to create value and to captur...

Telephone and railroads companies are more defensible than companies such as Facebook and Google because their business mainly relies on atoms instead of bits.

In contrast to bits, atoms have marginal costs. You can copy and paste a piece...

As a result of the vertical stack, companies are trying to:

1. Create layers on top of their business (everyone wants to be a platform)
2. Move down the stack to get closer to the base layer (to increase defensibility)

The base layer is the final interface between the stack and the end user – which is typically an operating system tied to a piece of hardware.

Value chains are horizontal visualizations of all the value-adding business activities involved in creating a product or service from start to finish.

Value chains are great to analyze traditional businesses and industries but they are not a very us...