Marcus Webb covers Big Tech strategy and platform economics. A veteran technology journalist with over 15 years of experience, Marcus specializes in explaining the competitive dynamics and strategic thinking behind the moves of the world's largest technology companies.
Counterintuitive but consistent: higher API prices often attract more serious buyers, reduce support burden, and improve retention. Here's the mechanism behind each.
The salary number on an offer letter is the least important variable in engineering economics. Most companies never learn this until the damage is done.
When HashiCorp flipped Terraform to a non-compete license in 2023, it revealed a structural problem the industry has been ignoring for decades.
Staging exists to catch bugs before production. It mostly catches the bugs that would never reach production anyway.
The acquisition offer isn't always about ownership. Sometimes it's about neutralization. The economics of competitive suppression explain more tech history than most people realize.
Burn rate tells you what a founder believes about the future. Here is how to read the signal correctly.
Clicking Send feels instant. The journey from user action to transmitted packet involves more coordinated machinery than most programmers ever stop to consider.
Read replicas promise to speed up your database without touching the primary. The hidden cost is consistency, and most teams don't find out until something breaks.
The Nortel patent auction wasn't a sad footnote to a corporate collapse. It was the business model working exactly as intended.
How Meta's 'Year of Efficiency' became a masterclass in what tech companies actually optimized during the hiring boom — and what they were hiding.
The middle tier exists to make the top tier feel reasonable. The bottom tier exists to make you feel like you have a choice.
Tech's biggest companies don't maximize profit on their best products. They extract it from their worst ones. Here's the structural reason why.
The middle option on a pricing page isn't a compromise. It's a trap built on decades of behavioral research.
When Google buys a startup or Meta acquires a social app, the official story is speed-to-market. The real story is control over what never gets built.
Feature creep is not a growth strategy. The apps that dominate their categories do so by reducing the core interaction to its irreducible minimum.
That powerful privacy control buried four menus deep isn't hard to find by accident. It's hard to find on purpose.
The labyrinthine exit clauses in enterprise software deals aren't bad legal writing. They're the product.
The real reason tech companies hide powerful features isn't bad UX. It's a business model decision dressed up as a design decision.
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