OpenAI Can't Make Money, X Won't Die, and Google Search Got Worse On Purpose

I started teaching a new semester this week. Digital Strategy, week one, the same three theories I open with every year. Ten minutes in I realised I wasn't teaching theory anymore. I was reading the news out loud with citations attached.Three frameworks, three stories happening right now:Platform economics. OpenAI built the most talked-about product of the decade, has hundreds of millions of users, and is reportedly losing billions a year. Microsoft has the distribution. Every startup on earth is building margin on top of infrastructure OpenAI runs at a loss. Creating value and capturing value turn out to be completely different jobs, and OpenAI has so far only done one of them.Network effects. Everyone announced they were leaving X. Repeatedly. With screenshots. It's August 2026 and X is still where news breaks. Bluesky is growing genuinely well and has changed nothing about X's position. Because leaving a platform was never a decision about the platform. It was a decision about everyone who hadn't left yet.Enshittification. Cory Doctorow's four-stage model, currently being performed by the entire AI industry in synchronised formation. ChatGPT went from free and unlimited in 2022 to usage caps and tiered pricing in 2026 and nobody was surprised. Meanwhile Google Search hit stage three so slowly that we all just adjusted our expectations downward without noticing: AI Overviews answer your question using publisher content so you never visit the publisher.None of this tells you what to do. That's not what theory is for. It tells you what you're looking at, which turns out to be the harder part.