Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Free distribution
The most interesting thing about the internet is free distribution. Bandwidth is a commodity, and the fact that anyone can pull out a phone and connect to any information source in the world for free, on a marginal cost basis, is why it changed everything.
Availability drives impact
Differentiated products by definition have lower TAMs, because there's an elasticity aspect to them: people's willingness to pay differs, so the market is constrained. Apple will never serve the whole world by selling a device, whereas Google can because its product is free. The more available something is to everyone, the more impactful it is.
Compute as a commodity
Compute and intelligence, the two most interesting and important topics in tech, may both be commodities that are less differentiated than technology usually is. Commodities often aren't considered as good a business as differentiated, high-margin products.
Why does a lower price widen a market?
At each lower price, more people can afford the product, so the number of buyers grows. Ford's Model T shows the effect: according to Ford's records, its price fell from $850 in 1908 to under $300 in the mid-1920s, and sales climbed. A product that stays expensive keeps its market small.
How did the internet make distribution nearly free?
Sending another copy of a digital file costs almost nothing once the network exists. The ARPANET carried its first messages in 1969, and the TCP/IP protocols that tie networks together were standardized on January 1, 1983. Every device that speaks them can reach every other.
How do commodity businesses make money?
Producers compete on cost, so the winners are the ones with the lowest cost per unit. In oil, production costs differ widely between fields, which is why some stay profitable at prices that shut others down. Scale and efficiency, rather than branding, decide who lasts.
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