TAG

# Product Rankings

2026-09-02

Google Didn't Invent Search. It Bought the Ad Model in a Settlement

Second on my board is Google Search, at 97. But when it launched in September 1998, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista were already running — and the paid-auction model that made it rich belonged to someone else. Overture sued for two years; the 2004 settlement cost Google 2.7 million shares. Neither of its two core pieces was original. It now holds 91.32% of global search.

2026-09-01

The iPhone Ranks First on My Board. On the Day It Shipped, It Couldn't Copy and Paste

I scored 99 products; the iPhone came first at 98. But lay out its first eighteen months and almost everything went wrong: no third-party apps, no copy-paste, no video recording, no MMS, 2G only, a $200 price cut 68 days after launch, and a public apology from Jobs. It got exactly one thing right — and that one thing happened to be the only one nobody could retrofit.

2026-08-31

GitHub Copilot Proved Autocomplete Was Worth Paying For Five Years Ago. This Week It Dodged the Blow Cursor Just Took

On November 12, OpenAI will cut off Cursor's model access — because SpaceX paid $60 billion to buy it on August 14. Cursor's CEO says OpenAI is only 5% of its traffic, so the cut is more a warning shot than a wound. But in the same story, GitHub Copilot — a product born five years ago running on nothing but OpenAI's models — quietly unhooked itself between April and August this year, ahead of anyone using that dependency as leverage.

2026-08-30

I Scored 99 Products. Adding One Attribute Called Durability Knocked the Ford Model T Down to 46th

The 100 Products That Changed the World is now a scored board: originality, scale, impact, experience, business and durability. Once durability is in, the Ford Model T falls to 46th, the Famicom to 73rd and the Walkman to 75th — while Coca-Cola sits at 3rd and the credit card at 4th. Products are not people: a person who retires is still a great person, a product that is discontinued is just an exhibit.