I apologize, having re-read this thread I can see where you are coming from. Yes for Data Science and Machine Learning use cases if I had to pick a platform today it would be Databricks.
I too work mostly with Databricks and Data Lakes and love its scalability, convenience and programmatic flexibility it offers.
That point which I agree with you might also mislead a non technical investor into thinking that Snowflake is inferior and will ultimately lose out to Databricks and hence a poor investment.
Snowflake until their recent announcement that they were introducing Snowpark and other features such as support for unstructured data were not even competing with Databricks for data processing and ML use cases. They announced in November 2020 of these new features and more recently in June 2021 allowed early access to select customers.
So we are comparing a future functionality offered by Snowflake with existing functionality offered by Databricks and are saying that Snowflake is losing.
So how is this not a net positive for Snowflake, the fact that they are still growing with their current product offerings which includes a ton of data warehousing features along with the analytic use cases. They are also expanding to more of the data processing use cases that Databricks succeeds in to distinguish themselves from other cloud data warehouse products.
In my mind a bigger threat to them is Azure Synapse which might be winning a lot of potential Snowflake customers as it is very similar to SqlServer and that familiarity makes it easier for people to adopt it. Synapse also well integrated with a lot of other tools offered by Azure for a true Microsoft experience. Google Bigquery might also be hurting them given its ease of use. However Snowflake entered this space with all these products already present in various forms and yet succeeded. So my money is on Snowflake. Also from what I have learnt from this board, the real metric for success is in their earnings release and Snowflake has been very successful so far. So regardless of all our fears about what might be happening based on anecdotal evidence, we could wait for their earnings release and commentary.