151–160 of 212 posts
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Hmm, how did I miss that?
I think those of us who lived through the 90s and 00s have a hard time counterdiscombobulating all the stuff that went down. People who experienced the 60s and 70s probably have similar difficulty.
what a discombobulating way to say "clarifying" :)
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Most of the acquisitions that happen aren’t because of fear of “disruption” which is a very overused and misunderstood term - especially when defined like Clayton Christensen. They are bought to be an accretive to an existing business or the acquiring company thinks they have scale advantage to multiply the value of the acquisition. Another way to put it, that these are “sustaining innovations”.
Im not sure how you’d quantify most here. The highest valuations are not paid for sustaining innovations, but for market access risks, which is what this thread was about. The two can be the same thing functionally, but “sustaining innovations” sounds much better in a shareholder meeting.
Neither LinkedIn or GitHub were going to disrupt Microsoft in anyway.
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Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt? Don't they have similar research and tech around these AI systems?
Something I find very curious - Google are doing the same kind of research and are in many ways futher along. They have thier own models like T5 that supposedly perform better. Are their exec unaware of their own strengths? For that matter, wasn't Google collecting masses of GIS data and doing intense self driving car research? Where is that product? Serious q - do google have so much money that they are doing tons o…
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Im not sure how you’d quantify most here. The highest valuations are not paid for sustaining innovations, but for market access risks, which is what this thread was about. The two can be the same thing functionally, but “sustaining innovations” sounds much better in a shareholder meeting.
Let’s take Apple. Apple has only made two large acquisitions - NeXT and Beats - in the modern area. NeXT was bought to “sustain” the MacOS and Beats was bought to jump start Apple Music and its audio business. Is there any reason to believe that Apple who was already streaming purchased movies and musics needed Beats to bring streaming technology to the store. Beats was never going to disrupt Apple’s business. In fac…
Post Jobs’ death they bought a black celebrity-driven entertainment company. This was absolutely a brand threat as Apple was now associated with Tim Cook, who is perhaps many amazing things but they do not include cool.
Fast forward a decade and Microsoft recognized the game that was being played, which is that a set of six murky quasi-monopolies attempt to acquire diverse revenue streams and not lose information sources or access to their markets. While LinkedIn or Github may not have been direct threats to any of Microsoft’s existing businesses, if someone else got ahold of them Microsoft would have zero social footprint, which would be a big problem for them, having essentially missed out on search as well.
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I disagree - tech _is_ software and it’s so ubiquitous that it’s essentially invisible.
Planes, trains, and automobiles are tech. Software is a specific subset, software is a subset of tolling and techniques that's applied to "tech" no more than circuit boards, wires, or the wheel. It doesn't have a special elevated status. The more people understand that the faster people will stop hero worshipping it.
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Let’s take Apple. Apple has only made two large acquisitions - NeXT and Beats - in the modern area. NeXT was bought to “sustain” the MacOS and Beats was bought to jump start Apple Music and its audio business. Is there any reason to believe that Apple who was already streaming purchased movies and musics needed Beats to bring streaming technology to the store. Beats was never going to disrupt Apple’s business. In fac…
Jobs, having been forced out of Apple, was leading NeXT at the time, and Apple was a failing hardware company. Software, driven by Apple’s founder was threatening to take Apple’s market. I don’t know how you can say this wasn’t potentially disruptive. Post Jobs’ death they bought a black celebrity-driven entertainment company. This was absolutely a brand threat as Apple was now associated with Tim Cook, who is perhap…
NeXT was already a failure and was transitioning out of the hardware business. Apple couldn’t make a modern operating system to save its life and was getting crushed by Microsoft.
> Post Jobs’ death they bought a black celebrity-driven entertainment company. This was absolutely a brand threat as Apple was now associated with Tim Cook, who is perhaps many amazing things but they do not include cool.
People aren’t buying iPhones because of a producer that most outside of Hip Hop only knew because he was the producer behind a famous White rapper (Eminem).
> Microsoft’s existing businesses, if someone else got ahold of them Microsoft would have zero social footprint, which would be a big problem for them, having essentially missed out on search as well.
Under Satya, they moved away from Windows everywhere to cloud and Office everywhere.
Azure isn’t popular because of GitHub. It mostly targets stodgy old Enterprise customers that are already on the MS platform. That’s not meant to be an insult. I was a stodgy old enterprise MS dev until 2018 when I started moving toward AWS technologies (where I now work).
I believe the doom-n-gloom around all of tech is rather overblown. There are sectors of tech that will absolutely struggle. Gig-economy companies won't ever meet their valuation. Negative PE ratio startups are realizing that hyper-scaling is not as infinite as they believed, and that means their earnings might never catch up to their price. Social media companies are finally facing stiff non-American competition (Tik…
Overly rosy take on big tech. I’ll use Google as example. Their execs are in full panic right now over OpenGPT. What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway. these guys will double their attrition targets if not have full blown…
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Overly rosy take on big tech. I’ll use Google as example. Their execs are in full panic right now over OpenGPT. What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway. these guys will double their attrition targets if not have full blown…
How do you know Google execs are in full panic over OpenGPT?
I believe the doom-n-gloom around all of tech is rather overblown. There are sectors of tech that will absolutely struggle. Gig-economy companies won't ever meet their valuation. Negative PE ratio startups are realizing that hyper-scaling is not as infinite as they believed, and that means their earnings might never catch up to their price. Social media companies are finally facing stiff non-American competition (Tik…
Overly rosy take on big tech. I’ll use Google as example. Their execs are in full panic right now over OpenGPT. What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway. these guys will double their attrition targets if not have full blown…
Transformers were invented at Google, which is the underlying tech on which GPT is built. I would say that counts as innovation.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learnin...
Here’s a Fed analyst policy briefing on market valuations today and going forward: https://www.federalreserve.gov//econres/notes/feds-notes/the... It’s an insight into how they’re thinking for one. For two, the conditions that led to the current economic situation are unlikely to be present in the future. In many cases those situations can’t be reproduced because they would require highly unlikely situations (another…
Population growth is great for GDP growth, but not necessarily quality of life.
Our economic system will explode violently in a default cascade without population growth or productivity growth and we haven't been able to figure out ways to consistently increase productivity, which is to say we need population growth to sustain our way of life.
It's why deflation is the boogeyman. Deflation is basically a win in a society with zero debt. Deflation is a humanitarian crisis at 130% public debt to gdp and whatever ~300% total debt to gdp we are at.
But population growth is a net loss for most of us. More plastic waste. More energy consumed and emissions created, more space taken up etc. There's already more than enough of us by any metric except the amount of gdp growth required to keep our economy running.