Platform war keeps on getting really interesting

The very general problem Twitter was addressing here is that when there are two companies that have good economics in their category, it's a very unstable situation for these platforms to be adjacent to each other in the supply chain. This kind of situation is more common when there are relatively high fixed costs and lower marginal costs, which is another way of saying that it's an unusually common situation in the software business (but has occurred elsewhere, like in chips and chip equipment, or even earlier in cases like the relationship between car companies and their suppliers or between railroads and steelmakers). That situation is unstable because it's so close to one of the most stable attractors in economic arrangements: a monopolist with a negotiating advantage against both suppliers and customers. When a company succeeds in commoditizing its complements ($), it has the ability to earn high profits and an expectation that these profits will stick around for a while, meaning that it has a fairly low internal discount rate and the means to invest in retaining its dominance. Substack and Twitter have a relationship that can be highly complementary: Substack is a great way to monetize a Twitter following, and, because of this, Twitter gets extra content from Substack writers who have either made it big or who hope to. And that latter point is worth exploring in more detail, because there are a few dynamics that are favorable for Twitter. It's easier to grow a Twitter following than a newsletter; tweets get retweeted more often than emails get forwarded, and a retweet probably leads to more incremental followers than an email forward leads to incremental subscribers. So for anyone whose master plan is to be running a profitable newsletter in a year or two, the right move right now is to express as many of their ideas as possible in a tweetable form. Survivorship bias being what it is—there are more news profiles of successful newsletters than failed ones, a