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2019 – The State of Technology
Howard Lindzon
December 13, 2018
Ben Thompson has a great piece up titled ‘The State of Technology At The End of 2018‘. Read it all. The conclusion:
..the enterprise market is thriving, and the consumer market is stagnant, dominated by the “innovations” that a few large behemoths deign to develop for consumers (and probably by ripping off a smaller company). Meanwhile a backlash is brewing on both sides of the political spectrum, but with no immediately viable outlet through competition or antitrust action, the politics surrounding technology simply becomes ever more rancid.
Still, some might argue, this moment may soon pass: just look at Microsoft. I praised them above for their new-found competitiveness, driven by the fundamental shift wrought by the combination of cloud computing and mobile that obviated their PC monopoly-based business model. Surely Google’s dominance will soon pass, just like Microsoft’s did, right?
I’m not so sure.
If you follow stocks prices, like we do here, you have seen this play out in the markets. Slack is going public in 2018, but Microsoft (with their Slack competitor Teams) is now the most valuable company in the world and an enterprise juggernaut once again. Salesforce, Workday, Mulesoft, Okta, Twlio, Zendesk raged higher most of 2018.
Ben is not so sure we have a technology around the corner that levels out the paying feiled enough to stop the consumer internet giants.
It is one reason why I am long FAANG right now, but the government sure wants to talk to them a lot.
Jeff Richards, a great venture capitalist at GGV, sees things a little differently from his angle of the investing world. His post titled ‘Oh What’s That Over There? It’s SMB Tech: $200+ Billion of Market Value Created in the Last 8 Years‘ is dead on. Please read it.
SMB tech has been an incredible sector for investors like Jeff. He says the real rise of SMB Tech can be traced to four important factors, all of which happened in the same 3-4 year window between 2006-2010:
CloudMobileDigitalPayments
I don’t think 2019 will be much different as platforms like Twilio ($TWLO) continue to emerge to further help SMB’s grow.
This trend should continue to be friendly.
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