Ben Thompson

speaker

42,103 appearances 120 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2024 last heard 21 Aug

Ben Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 39 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 5.

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Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · (Preview) Inference in the Agentic Future, xAI Is Two Companies in One, Q&A on Elon’s Lawsuit, Intel, Apple · 15 May 2026 podcast

All the money you raised for a startup went to buy Sun Systems. podcast-host

Like you would buy these incredible servers that was fully integrated, uh, super reliable, best there were, spark operating system. podcast-host

And you had to buy that to actually run your website so you could then build a business. podcast-host

So what happened was it's funny, actually, Hotmail was one of the first ones to do this. podcast-host

Ya Hotmail and Yahoo, but Google is the one that really did it at scale, uh, which was taking commodity hardware like Intel. podcast-host

Based systems and just building a ton of them and saying, like, these are way less reliable, way like flakier, much cheaper, but that's fine because once you get to our scale, even sun systems are gonna break down. podcast-host

And also, we're not gonna pay Sun all that money. podcast-host

And so it and they they designed an entire way of computing that assumed stuff was just way slower, way less. podcast-host

Less fragile, but we can do on software, we can work around that. podcast-host

We can have we can we can have built-in resiliency, built-in fault tolerance, all these sorts of things. podcast-host

Amazon took that concept. podcast-host

did it and made it available to everyone. podcast-host

So now if you're a startup, you didn't need your your you could start a website right away. podcast-host

Like with with nothing up front. podcast-host

And that was a podcast-host

And I I'm you know, that seems like sort of what I'm talking about. podcast-host

We you start out at the beginning, you have these dedicated super high-end systems that sort of do it all. podcast-host

And in the long run, every piece of that system is going to get disaggregated and become sort of commodity markets in their own right. podcast-host

Exactly. podcast-host

And and because it there's not like a user podcast-host

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