2/ At its March 2006 launch, AWS was probably the 4th or 5th cloud service run by a Fortune 500 firm
HP launched its Flexible Computing Service in Nov 2005
Sun Grid went into beta in 2004
IBM launched "Linux Virtual Services" in 2002!
But AWS is the only one anybody remembers
3/ I'll focus on IBM here -
From the WSJ in *2002*: "Linux Virtual Services allows customers to run their own software on mainframes in IBM data centers and pay rates based largely on the amount of computing power they use"
Last year, I spent my winter holiday reading hundreds of pages of equity research from the 1999/2000 era, to try to understand what it was like investing during the bubble
A few people recently asked me for my takeaways. Here they are -
2/ Every document hereon comes from my former employer Bernstein Research's internal research archive, which extend back to 1994
Unfortunately, they're not available to the public (even Bernstein's client website cuts off at 2003), but happy to give more details if necessary
3/ LESSON #1: Everybody knew it was a bubble
Unfortunately, the quip "it's not a bubble if everyone says it is" just isn't true
Investors were comparing the internet sector to tulip mania as early as mid-98. Bernstein held an entire conference on it in June 99!
1/ In September 1993, then-Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold wrote his landmark memo "Road Kill on the Information Highway", laying out a dozen-ish predictions on the rise of the internet
27 years later, I think it's a super interesting case study. Let's evaluate the predictions -
2/ PREDICTION #1: The rise of a surveillance society - police bodycams, CCTV, 24/7 personal recording, and deepfakes
GRADE: A-
Pretty close!
3/ PREDICTION #2: Telecommuting, an end to the "tyranny of geography" and gerrymandering
GRADE: B-
Alas, the electoral college still matters today. The WFH prediction hits closer, but turns out it took two and a half decades + a pandemic to get things going
1/ One of the biggest macrohistorical tech trends that I feel like nobody talks about is the triumph of closed systems over open systems in the last 20 years
2/ Openness used to be the default. PCs beat mainframes, Windows beat Mac OS, the WWW beat AOL, etc.
As a result, industry literature from the 90s emphasized cooperation - Hal Varian's seminal 1999 book on internet economics devotes 70 pages to the art of standard setting alone
3/ Meanwhile in 2020, major platforms are closed by default
Today, you can't port your data between social networks - or for that matter, between clouds. iOS is obviously closed. And I don't even know what an open version of Uber would look like.
2/ This note was originally my boss Toni's idea, i.e. that I should finally put pencil to paper on all of the various tech / investing thoughts that had been floating around my head
The specific "maxims" are partly jokes, but hopefully with kernels of truth belying them
3/ "Predicting the future is easy, making money is hard"
This maxim seemed to get the most traction on Fintwit (and I really do believe it)...
I count 95 predictions in total. A casual inspection suggests maybe... 30-ish were ultimately correct in some capacity?
So a ~32% hit rate. Predictions are hard!
Some winners in the thread:
- The 2010s become the post-PC decade; smartphones take over emerging markets
- Moore's law decelerates below 11 nm
- Social network analysis, data mining, and the "politics of information" become a core liberal issue
- Elon Musk "makes some big waves"
A sample of the many, many losers:
- eBooks displace traditional books
- A new desktop OS challenges Windows
- Augmented reality takes off
- Ubiquitous computing / RFID takes off
- Google commoditizes the telcos
- Facebook becomes the next Myspace
1/ So today I discovered the restaurant reservation app Seated, and it’s just bonkers
For those who aren’t familiar, it’s basically an reservation app for NYC/elsewhere that gives you ~20-30% back for dining at restaurants
2/ The discounts are striking in themselves, but the crazy (clever?) part is that it’s unclear all of the restaurants on Seated even know that they’re being listed on app
E.g., I make a reservation at Restaurant X, and apparently Seated has to manually *call* the restaurant??
3/ In other words: Seated appears to be bootstrapping its growth by listing *unknowing* restaurants on its app, and then *giving customers free money* afterwards... the restaurants might never even know the interaction took place!