I miss the old days of tech investing. Times were simpler. Companies were more focused. There were one or two companies that tended to be dominant within a certain fragment of the industry. Google was search and online advertising. Amazon was e-commerce. Intel was chips. eBay was marketplace. Microsoft was operating systems and productivity software. Cisco was networking. Apple was high-end devices. Facebook was social networking. Netflix was movies. You get the picture. Oh how times have changed.
The tech landscape now has led us down a different path. Each of these companies has been extremely successful in conquering their home turf. They are all wildly profitable and have more money than they know what to do with. So they repurchase shares and pay dividends and buy startups to add talent and new technology. And after they do all of that they still have billions of dollars extra sitting around. What to do?
It appears the answer now is to become a tech conglomerate. Heck, if we took over one area of the marketplace, why not shoot for the stars? Why not be everything to everybody? So now when we talk about the leading tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) the future looks far less predictable.
In the old world Tesla would be the de facto electric self-driving car play. But Google is building cars. So is Apple.
In the old world Oculus would have been the virtual/augmented reality play. But in the new world Facebook acquires them and then Microsoft and Apple and Google all start working on the same thing.
In the old world Netflix would be the benchmark for streaming video. Nobody would argue that households looking to get rid of their $100/month cable bills would substitute them with a half dozen individual services that cost $10-$20 per month. The expensive cable bundle is no worse than a bundle of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Now, YouTube Red, and CBS All Access. And as if there are not enough competitors vying for your TV dollars, it was recently reported that Apple has decided it has identified the next big thing; producing original TV content. Are you kidding me?
I understand that self-driving cars and streaming over-the-top video and virtual reality could all very well be huge markets over the long term. But everyone can't be a winner. Do you really think GM and Ford lack the ability to produce self-driving, electric cars? Are the Big Three auto makers going to be replaced by Apple, Google, and Tesla a decade from now? Are we really going to cancel our Comcast service and pay the same amount of money for less content by buying subscriptions to 6 or 8 streaming services?
The leading tech companies got to where they are today by being laser-focused on creating or improving upon one big tech trend. Becoming indispensable in that arena has made them billions of dollars and created a ton of shareholder wealth. They did not win out after a long, brutal battle with the other tech titans at the time.
The biggest risk to Apple, for example, is that the innovation they are focused on revolves solely around virtual reality, electric cars, and streaming TV and movies. That is not how Apple became Apple. And it is not the secret for them to stay at the top. The same goes for Google and Microsoft and Facebook. As long as these companies are battling against each other, as opposed to paving their own way to the future, I am afraid that those of us hoping for the next big thing to come out of the mega tech stalwarts may be disappointed. To truly develop a market-leading position you have to try something new and do so long before everyone else. Nobody is likely to catch Amazon in the public cloud computing space (although Google and Microsoft are trying, of course). They are years ahead because they saw the trend before anyone else and went all-in to the number one.