Thanks for the comments Smorg. I definitely don’t mind dissent/discussion and appreciate the time taken to do it!
re: AI, I agree AI is in it’s infancy, and very few companies are generating any sort of value with it, Google being the exception.
My bet is that AI will be a step-change the likes of which are hard to predict, and that most of the benefits of that step-change will accumulate to the Googles, Microsofts of the world. Who else has the compute power and budgets to hire, build and train the systems?
So yes, its a long-term (5 to 10+ years) bet. Google is using AI extensively already (eg: search, translate, image search, youtube etc) and my belief is that those investments are translating to the top line, but not in a very transparent way. Eg, through delivering better results, faster, and increasing the size of the Google moat.
Microsoft are taking a bit of a different tack (I think!) very much focussed on datacenters and cloud.
Will it pay off? I think so. Every step change (internet, cloud, motorcars…) seems to redefine how big companies can get and how fast they can grow.
re: Ecommerce, approximately 14% of total retail is ecommerce. My thesis is that will tend to 100% over time, perhaps through the metaverse, which is why I consider we’re a “small way to building out eCommerce”.
re: AAPL. A few years ago, Apple passed the $1T mark which is “big”. But just being “big” hasn’t stopped them growing to almost $3T now. I think their new processors are significantly superior to almost every other laptop processor, and in a way that can’t easily be replicated. I believe they could dominate the laptop market, growing from maybe 8% now to… 50%+. Once you have a macbook, its an easy in to the rest of the ecosystem. They also have the supply chain expertise to actually produce new products (glasses? metaversy things? whatever my 1 year old granddaughter will want for her 15th birthday) in ways that very few other companies could.
I’ll stop here, but thanks for the discussion!
cheers
Greg