Unsettled: Wix and the Strategy of Competing While the Rules Change (Corporate Autopsy)

UNSETTLED

Wix and the Strategy of Competing While the Rules Change

What happens when a successful business is still growing-but the world around it begins to change?

Wix built its success by making it easy for almost anyone to create a website. Then AI arrived, making it possible to create websites, apps and software simply by describing what you want.

But UNSETTLED is not simply a story about Wix versus AI.

In 2026, Wix's stock lost more than half its value in just five months. The company announced a restructuring affecting roughly a fifth of its workforce. Yet revenue was still growing and the business was still generating cash.

So what was really happening?

UNSETTLED follows Wix as technology, competition, customer behaviour, costs and investor expectations shifted around it-sometimes together, sometimes for completely different reasons. It looks beyond the obvious explanations to understand which changes really mattered, where the pressures came from, and what they reveal about a business whose old model had not stopped working.

For leaders, founders, investors and students of strategy, Wix offers a larger lesson: the numbers can tell you how a business is performing today. Understanding whether the world around that business is changing requires asking different questions.

Because sometimes the hardest time to rethink a successful business is while it is still successful.