The iPhone's Last Stand

Ben Thompson on the Silicon Valley bubble. What, other cities around the globe aren’t plastered with billboards advertising AI startups? This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if someone signed up with your referral code, you got more storage — and grew extremely fast amongst consumers; the company then spent too long trying to actually build a business in the consumer space, before finally realizing that the only way to make money with what was ultimately a productivity product was by selling to enterprise. The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why…