Very interesting chart in newletter: total cash on hand by industry. Tech's crazy growth dominates on this metric.
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I'd divide by market cap or revenue to adjust for sector size
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Depends what you care about. Gross cash is an interesting metric for agile power - i.e. cash that could be deployed for anything.
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Yes, but too much cash on the books for a larger company isn't about agility. It's being out of ideas. Hence stock buybacks as one response.
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Yea, that's the corollary that I'm most interested in. They have the ability to project this power into new realms, but lack ideas.
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What's it say when the biggest / most innovative companies are out of ideas? Are we at the final stage of the Perez curve?
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I'd say we're at the Perez wave of search (started ~'96), social ('05 or so), and mobile ('95 or '07). Enterprise is next. After that....?
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I'm not sure Perez model should be applied to micro technologies/trends.
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I think we're at the end of 5th TechRev. IT at maturity, with "intelligence" being the 6th TR - currently in the "frenzy" stage.
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Yeah Perez should not be applied sectorally. There are arrhythmias in global impact but that's not = localized impacts
Big tech companies are basically machines for turning global attention revenues into engineering talent upgrades
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Very unlike old economy companies which turned ore into steel. When marginal cost of production is zero, marginal cost of learning dominates
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why not? players from one space rarely play seriously in the next one. certainly if so they don't have monopoly if they do (self-driving)
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My model is something more like this:
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Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft exert similar dominance on the tech ecosystem as the Great Powers did in 1913.



