The Next AI Phase Is Taking Shape
We are a full two-and-a-half years into current AI mania, and signs point to us entering a new stage. There is a greater focus on product and competition as the most formidable AI start-ups go after branding and users. In addition, Big Tech companies are looking to keep existing users by integrating AI into current offerings.
AI mania could be grouped into three segments or eras:
ChatGPT chatbot comes on the scene. Late 2022. Several factors came together to produce something of an ideal storm including post-pandemic desire for something new and big (with growth in mind). Internal power struggles at OpenAI contributed to the mania by taking over the news cycle. The turmoil was partly driven by the growing fascination that was flowing to ChatGPT.
AI-related capex boom (the NVIDIA surge). 2023-2024. Every Big Tech company except Apple experienced a rethink of their capital expenditures trajectory with AI-driven data centers, cloud infrastructure, and related assets in mind.
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Big Tech Is Winning Over Wall Street
While Wall Street remains fully engrossed by NVIDIA, there is a story to be told that is flying under the radar.
While Wall Street remains fully engrossed by NVIDIA, there is a story to be told that is flying under the radar. With several key macro headwinds now in the rearview mirror, Wall Street has turned decidedly more optimistic on Big Tech (a bucket that I have long defined as including Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft). Big Tech as a group is up 28% in 2024 while the S&P 500 is up 15%.
Here are Big Tech market caps, with NVIDIA added in for good measure:
Microsoft: $3.3T
Apple: $3.2T
NVIDIA: $3.0T
Alphabet: $2.3T
Amazon: $2.0T
Meta: $1.3T
A couple things jump out at me about those totals.
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The Next TikTokification Phase Is Here
One of the defining post-pandemic shifts in tech has been unfolding in the social media space. Seemingly overnight, tech giants including Meta and Google found themselves on the ropes, fighting a new kind of competitor: TikTok and algorithm-fueled video timelines. From my vantage point of analyzing quarterly earnings, we are already seeing the next phase of TikTok’s influence seeping through the industry, and the observations make me increasingly worried about where things are headed.
Beginning in late 2021 and coming to a head in early 2022, Big Tech’s layoffs caught many people off guard. Various theories were floating around as to what was going on. Some of the theories came across as being a bit out there – such as Apple ATT being blamed for single-handily bringing down the entire advertising complex and all of the businesses that depend on it to drive revenue. The subsequent rebound (and we are talking in some cases strong rebound) in the advertising giants’ performance puts a fork in that questionable theory.
Instead, macro unknowns and TikTok hit Big Tech’s digital advertising revenue so quickly that management teams had no choice but to cut payroll ASAP.
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Big Tech’s Hardware Paralysis
It’s been a very busy two months for consumer gadget enthusiasts. With Samsung kicking off the fall product cycle earlier than usual in July to Google’s product event in NYC last week, we now have a good view of how tech companies are positioned heading into the holiday season. As the gadget recession rages on while AI mania remains palpable, the way companies are thinking about hardware is splintering, leading to more questions and unknown.
In terms of the underlying themes found with product events (six to be exact – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Apple, and Meta), there is a growing recognition / acceptance that ecosystems will dictate long-term success. Wearables are finally getting the attention they deserve. At the same time, years of Apple ecosystem momentum is front-and-center with most companies. There is no more denying that Apple’s billion-user installed base is a force to be reckoned with. Thoughts of competing with Apple on price are firmly in the rear-view mirror.
Here were more granular takeaways from this year’s fall product event cycle:
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The Art of the Turnaround
Bob Iger isn’t wasting time attempting to put Disney on his preferred track. Yesterday, the WSJ reported that Iger had axed Disney’s metaverse and membership teams – two initiatives in their infancy that were spearheaded by Bob Chapek. This follows a reorganization a few weeks back that returned power to the company’s creative executives. Disney is just one of a handful of companies that have been changing strategies to get a better footing in the marketplace.
We can look at Netflix’s move into advertising – something that executives had talked down and dismissed for years - as an acknowledgement of paid streaming becoming bigger than any one company.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Bet
Meta is the latest company to take a ride on the Wall Street roller coaster. After a horrendous year in 2022 with shares trading down 65%, Meta turned heads last week with the stock popping 25% after reporting earnings. The wild swings left observers scratching their heads as to what may have changed. How could a company considered by some to be fatally wounded see its shares more than double in just three months?
Year to date, the best-performing stocks in tech are those that struggled the most last year. Peloton has doubled in share price in just a few weeks. Spotify is up 80%. Roku up 60%. Market participants, represented by many different viewpoints and perspectives, are betting on a turnaround even if consensus isn’t quite sure what a turnaround will look like. Instead, it’s simply assumed to be better than what things were.
As we discussed three months earlier, the market was valuing Meta as having about a decade of life remaining.
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Valuing Meta
As Mark Zuckerberg contemplates some of his toughest business strategy decisions to date, Wall Street has already weighed in with its verdict on Meta: The company has about a decade left. While that dire prediction will likely morph with Wall Street’s always-changing mood, a closer examination of Meta’s valuation reveals several intriguing questions applicable to valuing Big Tech in general.
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An Advertising Pivot Is Beginning
In just the last week, there were two high-level and noteworthy departures at the giants:
Meta’s advertising head (who served as COO)
Amazon’s consumer retail chief
Earlier in the year, two noteworthy departures were found among smaller companies striving to one day become giants:
Spotify’s chief architect of its podcasting strategy
Roku’s head of platform business
At first, the four departures may seem unrelated to each other.
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Funding the Next Big Thing in Tech
One takeaway from the just concluded earnings season in tech land is that the giants are not alike. Each is facing its own set of business and financial challenges – both macro and micro. Despite the challenges, each of the giants is determined to fund the next big thing. What had been periodic jitters about ballooning costs and expenses has turned into full-fledged anxiety and concerns on Wall Street.
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Elon Musk Buys Twitter
It’s been quite the April for Elon Musk. Within just three weeks, Musk went from disclosing that he had spent months quietly amassing a 9% stake in Twitter, to accepting and then turning down a Twitter board seat, to finally having Twitter’s board accept his hostile takeover bid for $44 billion.
Musk buying Twitter is a big deal for a few reasons:
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The Absurdity Known as the Digital Markets Act
For the past two years, the European Commission has been formulating a series of regulations aimed at curtailing the tech giants in its 27 member states. Last week, the Digital Markets Act reached a finalized draft stage. While additional steps are needed before the end is reached, we are at a point where the major points of contention have been determined with implementation set to begin later this year. We are seeing the equivalent of the tech giants being taken hostage and told to both open their platforms to perfectly capable competitors and ensure that these same competitors don’t abuse their opportunities to harm consumers. It’s absurdity. There is no other way to describe what we are seeing. Customers in the EU don’t stand to benefit from the regulations. And as we will discuss shortly, a good argument can be made that the giants will be able to navigate the legislation without losing much, if any, momentum in the impacted countries.
At the heart of the issue is EU officials viewing the giants, or so called “gatekeepers,” as blocking or preventing smaller competitors from getting a fair shake.
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TikTok Is Blowing up the Status Quo
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Last week, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg sounded the alarm. TikTok was successfully taking engagement share away from his most-prized pieces of digital real estate: Facebook and Instagram. What had been theorized about for some time is now being discussed out in the open, and we may see others follow Zuckerberg in sending out SOS signals. Companies ranging from Spotify and Netflix to Roku are likely feeling TikTok pressure to some extent. Management teams just haven’t come to grips with such reality.
TikTok’s “secret sauce” is grabbing a shocking amount of viewer data in order to power a recommendation engine that puts YouTube’s algorithm to shame. Depending on how you interact with a particular 15 or 60-second video clip, subsequent video clips are then tailored to keep you wanting more. It’s not even so much about giving you the same video genre over and over either, which would likely lead to burnout. Instead, there is almost a natural ebb and flow to the video clips that keeps you engaged. TikTok’s video recommendations are so good that users are altering their daily content consumption habits because they have so much trouble moving off platform.
TikTok is blowing up the status quo by altering the entire content consumption space. Time that used to go to Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, gaming, and sleep is flowing to TikTok. Google and Facebook, seeing the risk that TikTok posed to their business, quickly released me-too products, YouTube Shorts and Reels, respectively. Each appears to be doing well based on management disclosure. The problem is, they aren’t slowing TikTok but rather cannibalizing existing attention and engagement that was already on YouTube and Facebook/Instagram.
Getting us to swipe through literally hundreds of 60 second or shorter video clips in one sitting is on one level frightening and another level disheartening. Attention spans are dwindling to the point that a multi-minute video is now considered too long. More worrying, we are seeing short-form video take the worst of social media and then be amplified.
“I saw it on TikTok” has become synonymous with false information and rumors. Thanks to the all-powerful recommendation engines powering short-form video platforms, problematic clips are spread to millions of people even more efficiently and quickly than we are accustomed to on social media.
Some video filters for short clips serve no purpose other than to make people feel bad about themselves.
Imitation art has always been a thing with which we turn to celebrities for ways of imitating them. Today, this has changed to the point of doing whatever some random person did on TikTok simply because it went viral. If a clip of a young person having a mental breakdown in a car while taping themselves goes viral, others feel they need to do something similar, all in an attempt to also go viral.
It’s not that these worrying trends were absent on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Instead, short-form video is social media on steroids.
The larger implications found with TikTok’s growing popularity involve how we consume both music and video. One reason why movie theaters don’t have a future is that the entire movie medium is under threat. The number of people willing to spend more than two hours watching a story unfold is declining. We have precedent for what is happening to long-form video when looking at the music industry. Technology has negatively impacted music as an art form. The move from album sales to downloads of individual songs that could be purchased on a standalone basis transformed the music industry. Most people today would be surprised to hear how a music album consisted of songs arranged in a way as to tell a story. Trying to figure out how to even listen to an album in song order is now a question posted in technical support forums. Music is now being equated to 15-second jingles that make for good TikToks.
Some may say that I am overreacting and simply afraid of the change found with short-form video. A few months back, I published a tweet saying short-form video will not lead to a good place. The product lead for YouTube Shorts responded by saying short-form video is additive to storytelling, specifically storytelling “powered by a collective of creators” around the same concept. I wasn’t convinced.
As for how companies will respond to the status quo being changed, there is reason to think not many will find answers. In a sign of Wall Street facing anxiety as to what may be unfolding in the content space, Netflix and Disney saw their market caps decline by a combined $250 billion from peak share prices. While both companies have since seen rebounds in their share prices, the amount of unknown surrounding business models in the scripted video space hasn’t gone away. Some are questioning just what the end goal may be in all of this. Is Netflix actually that different from Instagram in terms of needing to grab our time and attention to do well? What about Spotify’s bet on podcasting turning out not to be so much about pulling people away from Apple Music but keeping them off of TikTok? These questions begin to scratch the surface of how TikTok has blown up the status quo in terms of conventional wisdom as to where the competitive battle lines are actually drawn. We are moving to the point that the more powerful TikTok becomes, the more likely we are to see content consumption behavior change to boost TikTok (and short-form video in general) further.
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Tech’s Day of Reckoning Is Being Oversold
Whenever a new calendar year begins, there is an urge to press reset on the news cycle and existing strategies and plans. This doesn’t make much sense considering how, excluding new laws and taxes that may go into effect on January 1, the new year doesn’t usher in changes in marketplace conditions. Nevertheless, there is a psychological benefit found with using the new year to remove oneself from all of the noise and assess the big picture.
In looking back over 2021 to assess the major stories in tech, one topic quickly jumps out at me as having been all-encompassing. It was a very good year for the tech giants when it came to navigating the regulatory and legal landscape. Consider the following developments:
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NFTs and Crypto Are a Backlash to Social Media Wrongs
It is too easy to get caught in the weeds of a topic and in the process lose sight of the big picture. That scenario is occurring with both NFTs and crypto.
At a very simple level, the promise found with NFTs and crypto is said to be about empowering people. Instead of figuring out if NFTs and crypto meet that promise, there is more value found in understanding why such a promise exists in the first place. What tech development has harmed user empowerment to such a degree that NFTs and crypto are said to be needed to put things back on track? My suspicion is the answer will contain a great deal of insight regarding the future.
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Measuring Tech’s Diffusion in Society
One of the main drivers behind starting Inside Orchard was analyzing how the lines that have traditionally defined technology are being erased. The “tech industry” is a term with a finite lifespan. We are heading to a point where tech will be so diffused in industry that it will be indistinguishable from society as a whole.
A question that has been raised is how to measure such diffusion. The answer can serve as a valuable tool for knowing which industries have either already experienced such diffusion or are about to undergo significant transformation. Get the timing right, and there are significant financial and product strategy rewards up for grabs.
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Facebook’s Meta Rebranding: Logical Decision, Bad Timing
Facebook is no more, at least as it pertains to the $900 billon market cap company. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is now called Meta. Reactions to the rebranding have not been positive with most convinced the name change is a not-so-clever way to distract from ongoing fallout from the Facebook whistleblower. Others think Zuckerberg is trying to distance both himself and his other brands (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus being the big three) from negative connotations associated with Facebook.
Those entrenched in tech were reminded of Google’s Alphabet reorganization six years ago, which has not turned out to be as effective as Google envisioned. While the two events share some similarities, the differences can’t be ignored.
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