Companies

In May 2013 Adobe stopped developing Creative Suite and made Creative Cloud the way to get new versions of its flagship applications. By November 2014 it had 3.454 million paid subscriptions, up from 1.439 million, and its filing pairs the migration with cloud features such as Creative Cloud Libraries. Leaving now means leaving the library, the shared assets and the files where the work lives.

Airbnb replaced a fee split of roughly 3% on hosts and 14.1% to 16.5% on guests with a single 15.5% host fee. CNBC reported in August 2026 that Airbnb was moving all U.S. hosts to the new structure by September 15. AirDNA’s analysis of an earlier cohort found that about 30% of hosts raised prices enough to fully offset the fee.

In Ohio v. American Express (2018), the Supreme Court described Amex as competing with Visa and MasterCard through a different model, one focused on cardholder spending rather than lending. To fund better rewards, the Court said, Amex charges merchants higher fees than its rivals. It held that this cross-side trade-off had to be judged across both sides at once.

Internal Apple emails later entered in Epic v. Apple indicate that executives viewed iMessage availability on Android as reducing the switching barrier for iPhone families. In 2016, Phil Schiller opposed moving iMessage to Android, and Apple never shipped it.

In September 1958 Bank of America mailed 60,000 credit cards to people in Fresno, California, after recruiting about 300 merchants to accept them. The 99% Invisible episode reports that by 1959 the bank had mailed more than 2 million cards, had lost about $20 million, and did not turn a profit until 1961. The system it built later became Visa.

VMware’s fiscal 2023 annual report describes more than 830 technology partners, including AMD, Cisco, HPE, Intel and NVIDIA, and more than 4,500 cloud providers in over 130 countries. Broadcom, which bought VMware for $61 billion, ended perpetual licenses and bundled hundreds of components into four packages. AT&T said its bill would rise 1,050%, and European cloud providers reported increases of 800% to 1,500%.

Coca-Cola sold territorial bottling rights in 1899 because its first bottlers could not fund national plants themselves. Today its independent bottling partners, distributors and retailers put drinks bearing its trademarks in front of consumers 2.2 billion times a day, about 3% of an estimated 65 billion daily beverage servings worldwide. The company earns from concentrate and brand while partners carry the trucks, plants and cold storage.

On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola changed its formula for the first time in 99 years, to one preferred in taste tests with nearly 200,000 consumers. Hotline calls rose from 400 a day to 1,500 by June, and the original returned as Coca-Cola Classic on July 11, after 79 days. The company’s own summary is that the tests did not show the bond consumers felt with their Coke.

Costco ran 890 warehouses and $249.6 billion in net sales in fiscal 2024, with 76.2 million paid members. Executive members, 35.4 million of them, accounted for about 73.3% of worldwide net sales. The customers who pay the most to belong are the ones who buy the most, which is how a business built on fees is designed to work.

Disney announced its three-service bundle at $12.99 in August 2019 and has kept building on it. On its November 2025 earnings call, Iger said bundle subscribers churn less than single-app subscribers, and that about 80% of subscribers to the new ESPN service had taken the Trio bundle, which includes Disney+ and Hulu. The call gave no churn figures.

Dollar General ended fiscal 2025 with 20,893 stores and $42.7 billion in net sales. About 75% of the U.S. population lives within five miles of a store and roughly 80% of stores sit in towns of 20,000 or fewer people. Its filing describes the format as small, close to customers and low-cost, so density in each town is part of what keeps its prices low.

Dropbox’s 2018 IPO filing reported over 500 million registered users, more than 100 million of whom had signed up since the start of 2017. It reported 11 million paying users and $1,106.8 million of 2017 revenue.

Thefacebook.com launched at Harvard on February 4, 2004, with 650 registered students by the time the Crimson wrote about it five days later. CNN’s timeline records that it opened to Yale, Columbia and Stanford a month after launch and reached 1 million active users by December 1, 2004. The expansion followed groups of friends, not a national push.

Ferrari’s 2024 report links its low-volume strategy to customers’ willingness to pay and says it manages waiting lists to preserve exclusivity. The company also notes that this policy limits sales growth and profit. From 2022 to 2024 shipments rose 4 percent, from 13,221 to 13,752 cars, while net revenues rose 31 percent, from €5,095 million to €6,677 million, and operating profit rose 54 percent.

Henry Ford announced in 1909 that the company would build one model, with the same chassis for every car. Highland Park opened on January 1, 1910, and after the moving line arrived in 1913, chassis assembly fell from 12 hours 8 minutes to 93 minutes by 1914. The price fell from $850 in 1908 to $490 in 1914 and $260 in 1924.

Google’s 2022 revenue-share payment to Apple was an estimated $20 billion, and nearly 95% of iPhone searches go to Google. After the 2024 liability ruling, the September 2025 remedies order barred exclusive distribution contracts for Search, Chrome, Assistant and Gemini, but still allowed paid defaults on terms limited to one year. Whether that opens the market is disputed: a ProMarket analysis called the decision to permit payments too narrow a remedy.

The August 2024 findings in United States v. Google describe queries as the raw material for ranking: Google sees nine times as many queries as all rivals combined, and NavBoost trains on 13 months of click-and-query data. The court found that scale helps Google crawl more sites, re-rank results and improve ad matching. In its September 2025 remedy it ordered Google to share some index and user-interaction data with qualified rivals.

Hotmail appended a promotional line to every message its users sent, so that each email carried an invitation. Its investors reported more than 12 million subscribers in about eighteen months on under $500,000 of marketing. Microsoft announced the acquisition on December 31, 1997 and did not disclose the price.

In Porter’s 1996 account, IKEA replaced sales staff with self-service and third-party makers with its own modular, ready-to-assemble designs. Shoppers do their own pickup and delivery, and IKEA will sell a roof rack that can be returned for a refund on the next visit. A customer who wants a decorator and delivery in six to eight weeks is not the one it built for.

After seven deaths from cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules sold in five Chicago stores, J&J recalled about 31 million bottles at a cost of $100 million. PBS reported that the tampering happened after the product left the factory, yet the company took the loss. Share dropped from 35% to 7%, then recovered to 30% by mid-1983 and 35% by year-end.

In the second quarter of 2024 McDonald’s U.S. comparable sales fell 0.7 percent, against a 10.3 percent rise a year earlier, because guest counts fell and higher menu prices only partly offset them.

Microsoft included Teams by default in Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The European Commission preliminarily found that this amounted to tying since at least April 2019 and issued a Statement of Objections on June 25, 2024. On September 12, 2025, it accepted commitments: suites without Teams at a lower price, a price gap Microsoft widened by 50% for some suites after a market test, plus interoperability and data export for rivals, binding for seven years or ten for interoperability and portability. Slack and alfaview then withdrew their complaints.

In United States v. Microsoft, the district court found that Windows held more than 95% of the market for Intel-compatible operating systems, and that its position rested on an applications barrier to entry. Windows supported more than 70,000 applications; IBM’s OS/2 peaked at about 2,500. The appeals court accepted that consumers value applications they may never use, because a large catalog assures them their future needs will be met.

Moody's Investors Service reported a 63.6% adjusted operating margin in 2025 on a business registered with the SEC as a nationally recognized statistical rating organization. Its 10-K says a Moody's rating helps an issuer reach a wider investor audience. The moat, on this evidence, is investor reliance on the rating rather than any physical asset, and the same filing warns that defaults bring investigations, litigation and regulatory scrutiny.

Myspace had 75.9 million U.S. unique visitors at its December 2008 peak and 34.9 million in May 2011, according to comScore. News Corp. paid $580 million for it in 2005 and agreed to sell it in June 2011 for about $35 million. The Hollywood Reporter tied the fall to Facebook becoming the dominant social network.

After the July 2011 price change and the Qwikster announcement, Netflix lost 0.8 million U.S. subscribers in a quarter, and its stock had fallen more than 40 percent below its pre-increase level by the time Hastings apologised. In January 2025 it raised prices in four markets while reporting 18.9 million paid net additions and forecasting a 29 percent operating margin for the year, up from 27 percent in 2024.

Netflix paid $17.0 billion for content assets in 2024 and ended the year with 301.6 million paid memberships. Its cost of revenues per average paying membership fell from about $86 in 2022 to about $76 in 2024, by our arithmetic from the filings, while revenue per member stayed near $11.70. Operating margin rose from 18% to 27%.

Switch 2 launched on June 5, 2025, and Nintendo sold more than 3.5 million units in four days, its best first four days for any hardware.

In fiscal 2025 Nvidia’s revenue more than doubled, from $60.9 billion to $130.5 billion, while its GAAP gross margin rose from 72.7 percent to 75.0 percent. Those figures show rapid revenue growth alongside high reported gross margins; they do not show whether buyers competed for supply or how each customer responded to price. Fiscal 2026 revenue reached $215.9 billion, and its gross margin for the year was 71.1 percent after a $4.5 billion charge on H20 chips affected by a U.S. licensing requirement.

NVIDIA introduced CUDA in 2006, opening its graphics chips to general computing, and says more than 7.5 million developers now use CUDA and its other software tools. Revenue for fiscal 2026 was $215.9 billion, up 65%. The chip is only part of what a competitor must match: the libraries, frameworks and trained developers that sit on top of it have to be matched as well.

NVIDIA’s annual report says it opened its GPUs to general computing with CUDA in 2006. Its count of developers using CUDA and its other software tools rose from 3.8 million in its fiscal 2023 filing to 5.9 million in fiscal 2025 and 7.5 million in fiscal 2026, when revenue reached $215.9 billion. Each of those developers’ code, libraries and habits makes a competing chip harder to adopt.

In September 2022 the Chouinard family gave Patagonia to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which holds all voting stock (2% of the total), and to the Holdfast Collective, which holds the other 98% and receives the profits not reinvested. Patagonia projected an annual dividend of roughly $100 million, depending on the health of the business. The structure makes the company’s environmental promise costly to abandon.

Steve Huffman said in a 2012 video lesson that he and Alexis Ohanian submitted all of Reddit’s early content. They created new usernames as they did so, Adweek reported, so that the site looked populated when it was really just the two of them. The site had no members yet, so the founders acted as the members.

Salesforce reported $63.4 billion of remaining performance obligation, up 11%, at the end of fiscal 2025, and an attrition rate of about 8% excluding Slack self-service. Its annual report credits a growing ecosystem, including Data Cloud and a community of 19 million Trailblazers, and says more than 90% of the Fortune 500 are customers. Each customer’s data, configuration and trained staff sit inside the platform.

Porter described a system in which a 15-minute gate turn, a standardized 737 fleet and automated gate ticketing supported low fares on short routes. Meals, assigned seats, interline baggage and premium classes were left out on purpose. Continental’s attempt to match it while remaining a full-service airline shows why the refusals mattered.

Spotify added 15 hours a month of audiobooks to Premium in October 2023 and, in April 2024, classified its Premium plans as music-and-audiobook bundles, which lowers the mechanical royalty rate it pays in the United States. The National Music Publishers’ Association estimated the cut at $150 million a year. In June 2024 Spotify launched a Basic plan without audiobooks at $10.99, one dollar below Premium Individual at $11.99.

TSMC spent NT$1.27 trillion on capital expenditures in 2025, primarily to install and expand capacity, mainly for its 2-, 3- and 5-nanometer nodes. It shipped about 15 million 12-inch equivalent wafers against capacity above 17 million, and gross margin rose from 56.1% to 59.9%, which it attributes mainly to higher utilization and cost improvement.

Uber’s 2019 filing reported 1.5 billion trips and an average five-minute wait for a pickup in the fourth quarter of 2018, across more than 700 cities. It presents the network as a liquidity loop built city by city.

UPS built ORION from data gathered by its drivers' handheld devices and vehicle telematics, and spent about a decade developing it before the 2013 rollout. It cost $250 million to build and deploy, and UPS expected it to save $300 million to $400 million a year. The company said the software is tailored to UPS operations, and it still encourages drivers to override its sequence when they see a better option.

In fiscal 2025 Visa reported $40.0 billion of net revenue and $24.0 billion of operating income, about a 60% margin, after a $2.6 billion litigation provision. Its network connected nearly 5 billion payment credentials to more than 175 million merchant locations and handled $17 trillion of payments and cash volume. A card is useful only where merchants accept it, and a merchant accepts the cards its customers carry, so a rival must build both sides at once.

When Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp in February 2014, the service had more than 450 million monthly users and was adding over one million registered users a day. Facebook’s release used those figures to support a price that included shares and restricted units equal to 7.9% of Facebook’s shares.

Zillow had more than 220 million average monthly unique users and the Zestimate, and about three and a half years earlier had decided to make Zillow Offers a big bet. On November 2, 2021, it announced the wind-down of the business after a $304 million inventory write-down, a 25% workforce reduction and a stated inability to forecast home prices accurately. The audience did not give Zillow the ability to price homes months ahead.

Zynga’s 2012 annual report said it acquired most of its players through unpaid channels, using the viral and sharing features of social networks. It also said Facebook was its primary distribution and marketing platform and the source of substantially all its players. Average daily users fell from 72 million in the second quarter of 2012 to 56 million in the fourth.