As I began migrating some old articles, from my http://fishtrain.com/ Wordpress site to Medium, it has been fun to review and re-read articles that I had written more than 15 years ago! It’s been enlightening to see which predictions hit the mark and which missed badly.
Hits
Apple
While I could not have predicted the leadership changing from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook, the transition has been mostly smooth — besides a bumpy start for the first couple years. While most thought innovation would cease with Steve Jobs’ passing — and I admit that I was initially worried — Apple has continued to innovate and remain dominate on the consumer-side and has slowly moved into the enterprise, first with the iPhone and later Macs and iPads.
While Tim Cook has been mostly viewed as an operations and finance guy, Apple has released several new innovative product lines under Tim Cooks’ watch. These products include: Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Vision Pro, and Services.
The other game changing innovation is Apple’s foray into designing their own A-series and S-series chips, and later, Apple Silicon. This has opened up new markets for Apple in terms of gaming, graphics, entertainment, AI, AR/VR, and productivity.
There are over 2 billion active Apple devices worldwide.
The iPhone changed everything and remains the leader.
Apple’s focus on privacy and security has gained it additional consumer trust.
However, with AI and ML reaching critical mass, the game has changed. There is a potential existential risk to their search dominance in the long-term. Google is threatened by Generative AI from companies, such as: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, among others. To remain relevant, it is crucial that Google’s DeepMind, Gemini, and other AI technologies are strong or leading alternatives. Afterall, they were the pioneers of Generative AI.
Google Apps has seen traction, but Microsoft Office has retained the lion’s share in that category.
Google Chrome web browser is the leading web browser.
Globally, Android is the leading mobile operating system.
Google is consolidating their disparate AI groups under Google DeepMind: Google Research, DeepMind, Google Brain.
There are over 8.5 billion Google searches daily.
I did not foresee Google creating an umbrella company called Alphabet. I still have not heard anyone say they work for “Alphabet.” They still say, “I work for Google.”
Investment: From July 3, 2012 to July 3, 2024, GOOG stock has an ROI of 1181% (24% annualized).
NVIDIA
Jensen Huang has built a dominant and generational powerhouse. NVIDIA GPUs have been beating Moore’s Law for decades now, in gaming and 3-D rendering, so I did foresee there would be demand for offloading, heavy number crunching from the CPU to the GPU for other computing applications.
However, I did not foresee that Generative AI would make so much headway in the past couple of years — as AI has been fairly stagnant for many years — and recently create a massive, massive GPU purchasing arms race for computational power. It seems like every Big Tech company and start-up is trying to purchase NVIDIA GPUs for AI purposes.
NVIDIA has the full stack of: hardware (GPUs, networking), software applications, partnerships, and developer tools (CUDA, SDKs, APIs). This is a giant moat against would-be competitors.
Undeniably, NVIDIA GPU’s advancements have been incredible. There revenues and profits have been growing at an astronomical rate. However, at the moment, it’s hard to predict if this exponential stock price rise in the past couple years is sustainable or if it’s getting a little ahead of itself from an investment standpoint. Is it a bubble or will increasing demand continue for many more years?
Investment: From July 3, 2012 to July 3, 2024, NVDA stock has an ROI of 3953% (36% annualized).
Misses
Microsoft
Microsoft leadership has also changed from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella and Nadella has made a lot of excellent strategic moves:
The slumbering giant has revived a culture of innovation and engineering. First, with Azure Cloud, then later with acquisitions, partnerships, and investments, such as: GitHub, LinkedIn, Minecraft, Activision, and OpenAI.
Microsoft no longer makes everything dependent on Windows. And Windows is no longer the centerpiece of their strategy (even though they have more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices using Windows worldwide).
Office 365 moved to a subscription model and works on multiple operating systems.
Azure Cloud was invested in heavily and is in tight competition with Amazon Web Services.
Internet Explorer browser is no longer dominant and has been End-of-Life’d and replaced with Edge.
The empire lives on and is as dominant as ever.
Investment: From July 3, 2012 to July 3, 2024, MSFT stock has an ROI of 1767% (28% annualized).
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Meta
Meta’s leadership adjustments and acquisitions changed their trajectory. In addition to continuing to grow Facebook, Meta was able to successfully acquire and integrate: Instagram, WhatsApp, Occulus, and many other smaller companies into mult-billion user platforms.
I definitely did not see Facebook growing so quickly and surpassing all other social networks. Among other things, good engineering and design provided a highly scalable and available application. Meanwhile, MySpace’s lack of scalability led to long load times, frequent crashes, frustration, and eventually users unfriended Tom.
I definitely did not foresee Facebook renaming the company under the umbrella of Meta.
Excited to see the ongoing rivalry with Apple in the AR/VR space.
Meta stated that 4 billion people were using at least one of the company’s core products each month.
My valuation verdict was way off. Looking back, it was a bargain for Microsoft to invest in them in the early days and for those individuals purchasing Facebook stock at IPO. (Fortunately, I started purchased some shares a few years later — once I saw their growing cash flow statements).
Investment: From July 3, 2012 to July 3, 2024, META stock has an ROI of 1538% (26% annualized).
I have yet to see interoperability between social networks like we see for email or text messaging between phone carriers. Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn all continue to be walled gardens and proprietary. Unified messaging between social networks is still a pipe dream.
Internet bandwidth and speeds have increased to the point that we have high-definition streaming video, music, and Zoom meetings. We have fiber-to-the-home and speeds are measured in Gigabits.
Cable TV is still around, but now there are also dozens of streaming services, including: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+, Apple TV+, YouTubeTV, Sling TV, Max, Fubo, Peacock, Paramount+, Starz, etc. The “Great Unbundling” of channels has provided more choice, but not necessarily made it easier to find something good to watch.
Telecom providers are still around, but instead of the Big 4, there are the Big 3 in the United States: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Most have disabled the landline connection, but everyone needs a cellular connection.
Streaming music and video have reduced the need to own giant collections of music, movies, and TV shows. Instead, we can have on-demand access to nearly all music, movies, and shows — as long as we continue to pay a subscription.
Subscription fatigue.
Buzz words for related things over the years: Servers, Data Centers, Cloud Computing.
SSDs replaced Hard Drives. Life-changing.
Fusion-io was acquired by Sandisk. Shortly after, SSD flash memory became mainstream.
Intel lost its manufacturing lead to Samsung. Samsung lost its lead to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Semiconductor manufacturing is nearing transistor sizes of 1 nm. Soon after, we’ll be manufacturing transistors at atomic-levels and measuring in angstroms!
For a few years, COVID-19 shutdowns accelerated remote work, but this seems to be reversing slightly with many companies adopting return-to-office (RTO) and hybrid work.
Google Search is still the search leader; YouTube remains the video search king.
MySpace is gone and Meta is the dominant social network company with their extremely popular apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Currently, their main challenger, TikTok, is dealing with U.S. regulatory hurdles.
LinkedIn is now the dominant career/work social network and owned by Microsoft — further cementing their enterprise status.
Twitter is now X.
Amazon, the online retailer, also became a tech giant with AWS and mainstreamed the utility computing billing model. Since then, it has built a sprawling ecosystem of businesses around AWS.
Electric Vehicles, residential solar panels, and energy storage is slowly becoming popular.
Tesla has shown that an EV can be profitable, reliable, and somewhat cool. Is Rivian next?
The Market Capitalization of Tesla is now worth more than that of Ford, GM, Stellantis, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, BYD, Hundai, and Kia combined.
On mobile “there’s an app for that” and on the desktop the web browser seems to be the starting point.
AR and VR is still not mainstream, but making progress as-we-speak.
Generative AI is rewriting the tech industry and has brought on the next Industrial Age. Who knew Generative AI just needed more Big Data to become a game changer?
Apple and Microsoft are still around and remain dominate as ever. Both are printing money and approaching growth in very different ways.
The stock market has been focused on FAANG, then MAMAA, then the Magnificent 7 tech companies. You would have done well, and beat the S&P 500 index by a significant amount, if you invested in any of them.
