Crippling

You're seeing Crippling when a company targets a competitor's most critical dependency — signing an exclusive deal with their key supplier, poaching their core engineering team, or undercutting the single product that funds everything else.

You're seeing Crippling when a platform changes terms or access in a way that breaks the business model of companies built on top of it. The platform doesn't compete directly — it disables the dependency.

Map your own critical dependencies and your competitors'. Protect yours through diversification and redundancy. When competing, look for the leverage point where a single move degrades an opponent's ability to function — that's the crippling move.

Bezos systematically crippled competitors not by attacking their products but by undermining their cost structures and distribution advantages. Amazon's investment in logistics, Prime membership, and AWS gave it structural cost advantages that competitors couldn't match. When Amazon entered a category with lower prices and faster delivery, it didn't need to outperform on product — it crippled the competitor's unit economics and customer acquisition. Founders can apply this by identifying the structural advantage their competitor depends on and finding ways to neutralise it. Don't fight on their terms; remove the foundation their model stands on. The most effective competitive moves often target the dependency, not the product.