A few weeks back, I put up a post on how if you ran MSFT in reverse (I called it “Benjamin Button’ing” the investment), you would have a massive loser and anyone who held on to it would be accused of massive style / thesis drift. Instead, people who bought it as a value play and held on to it becoming a tech juggernaut have produced incredible results and are lauded despite the obvious style drift over time.
Another interesting question: to what extent do these globally dominant giants have (significant) optionality around their ability to leverage their networks, scale, and technology stacks to dominate entirely new and currently unforeseen markets?
For example, while it's yet to be determined whether META will kill TWTR (it's more nuanced than that, but I'm trying to keep it simple), META has a huge leg up by virtue of its existing networks and scale vs. that TWTR killer I'm incubating in my garage. AMZN, MSFT, and GOOG were likewise able to leverage the compute infrastructure that they had built to run their globally dominant online commerce, software, and search businesses to dominate the newly emerged cloud computing opportunity, while AAPL was able to leverage control over its closed hardware platform to create the world's largest and most lucrative services business.
Historically there has been significant attrition among globally dominant corporations. Is it different this time? Are we at a point where the networks, scale, and technology stacks of these giants makes their dominance - not just of current but also future markets - unassailable?
If true, this has wide ranging implications across many fields (economics, politics, etc.); to return to the mundane, maybe as investors we have finally reached the promised land of one decision stocks?
When the large tech stocks get cheap, it's not because people aren't aware of their network effects, It's rarely because people think someone else is going to recreate Office, or the iPhone, and compete those profits away. Rather, it's that people feel that those products for one reason or another are going to lose their salience in the future. Or, in the particular case of Meta, both that and that the CEO was setting large amounts of money on fire.
Another interesting question: to what extent do these globally dominant giants have (significant) optionality around their ability to leverage their networks, scale, and technology stacks to dominate entirely new and currently unforeseen markets?
For example, while it's yet to be determined whether META will kill TWTR (it's more nuanced than that, but I'm trying to keep it simple), META has a huge leg up by virtue of its existing networks and scale vs. that TWTR killer I'm incubating in my garage. AMZN, MSFT, and GOOG were likewise able to leverage the compute infrastructure that they had built to run their globally dominant online commerce, software, and search businesses to dominate the newly emerged cloud computing opportunity, while AAPL was able to leverage control over its closed hardware platform to create the world's largest and most lucrative services business.
Historically there has been significant attrition among globally dominant corporations. Is it different this time? Are we at a point where the networks, scale, and technology stacks of these giants makes their dominance - not just of current but also future markets - unassailable?
If true, this has wide ranging implications across many fields (economics, politics, etc.); to return to the mundane, maybe as investors we have finally reached the promised land of one decision stocks?
When the large tech stocks get cheap, it's not because people aren't aware of their network effects, It's rarely because people think someone else is going to recreate Office, or the iPhone, and compete those profits away. Rather, it's that people feel that those products for one reason or another are going to lose their salience in the future. Or, in the particular case of Meta, both that and that the CEO was setting large amounts of money on fire.