The 20th-century playbook for ecosystem power was dominance - own the customer, the channel, the lock-in. The 21st-century playbook is dependence - be the layer every firm in the ecosystem can't function without.
Dominance is increasingly expensive. Antitrust, AI-mediated switching, customer agents acting on behalf of users - all chip away at the moats that used to make dominance durable.
Dependence is harder to build and much more durable. Customers don't notice you. Other firms route through you to function. That's the new shape of ecosystem power.
Dominance is built through visible control - owning the customer relationship, the brand, the distribution channel. It's also visibly contestable. Regulators see it. Competitors see it. Customers see it and resent it. The moats are real but eroding under all three pressures.
Dependence is built through invisible indispensability - becoming the layer other firms route their operations through. CCC in auto insurance. Stripe in payments. Plaid in financial connectivity. AWS in compute. Customers don't know you exist. Every firm in your industry depends on you to function.
Dependence is harder to attack because there's no obvious customer to liberate. The dependent firms can't easily leave because their operations are built around you. The regulator can't easily break you up because you're infrastructure. The customer doesn't notice. Removing you would just cause chaos.
A dependence position so deep nobody notices the power.
Visa is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It doesn't lend money. It doesn't have direct relationships with most cardholders. It's a network - a coordination layer between issuers, merchants, and acquirers. Every credit card transaction in dozens of countries routes through Visa or Mastercard.
Antitrust has chipped at Visa for decades without dislodging it. Customers don't think of Visa as their provider - they think of the bank that issued the card. Merchants resent the fees but can't credibly stop accepting Visa. The dependence is so deep nobody really fights it.
That's the dependence playbook. Not owning customers. Not fighting battles. Being the layer the system runs through.
The two aren't mutually exclusive - some firms hold both - but most strategic focus today is still on dominance, which is the harder game to win and the harder position to keep.
Stripe doesn't own a single end consumer. It's infrastructure - the layer every modern internet business routes payments through. Stripe's competitive position isn't customer love. It's the operational dependence of thousands of firms that built on it.
Removing Stripe from those firms would require months of re-engineering. The dependence is the moat.
Foundation model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) are increasingly the layer agent frameworks route through. Customers of agent products don't think about which model is underneath. The dependence is structural - and growing faster than most ecosystems realise.
The dependence-based position will outlast any of the current customer-facing brand moments.
Each unfolds different shape of ecosystem power.
You can pursue ecosystem power through dominance - own the customer, own the channel, own the lock-in - or through dependence - make yourself so useful to other firms' operations that they can't function without you. The dominance playbook is dying. The dependence playbook is just starting.
Customers can leave the firms that dominate. They can't easily leave the layer everyone depends on.
An advisory engagement that designs the ecosystem position you can credibly hold through dependence - the layer the rest of your industry routes through to function.