Incumbents are shipping MCP servers at speed, and many are quietly accelerating their own irrelevance. But the protocol isn’t what does the damage. Opening your product as callable tools doesn’t create the problem — it reveals whether you ever had a moat.
- When Your Product Becomes a Tool — The thesis — and why withholding a server is worse than shipping one.
- What Dissolves When You Become Callable — Six losses, and only two of them appear in the integration plan.
- Substrate or Façade — Four tests that tell you which side of the line you’re on.
- The Incumbent’s Playbook for an MCP World — Eight moves, and four things to stop doing immediately.
- Buying in an MCP World — The same analysis from the buyer’s chair.
- Your MCP Server Is an Attack Surface — Tool output is untrusted input, and your agent carries someone else’s authority.
- What Agents Cost to Run — Cost per outcome, not per token — and the retry loop that eats the margin.
