The Dependency Death Spiral

A thought exercise in value capture, from the future By early 2029, the AI services market had learned what enterprise software had known for decades: you cannot build durable margin on rented

A thought exercise in value capture, from the future By early 2029, the AI services market had learned what enterprise software had known for decades: you cannot build durable margin on rented dependencies. The companies that survived the great inference shakeout of 2027-2028 shared a single characteristic--they owned the layer of the stack their service relied upon. Those that didn’t had been margin-compressed into acquisition targets or outright failures. The pattern was consistent enough to f