News Analysis

Sam Altman just faced his Steve Jobs moment when the OpenAI board fired him on Friday. The balance between too much governance and not enough innovation was the challenge OpenAI faced. This was a very immature board with members who had never built companies, never moved from ideology to commercialization, nor had any pragmatic board experience.

Temporary Slow Down Ahead All indications from Constellation's 1000 person executive network show a temporary 3 to 6 month slowdown ahead. This pause in general IT spending impacts mostly the North American markets.

The Q1 Tech Earnings Breathe Life Among The Digital Giants. With just Apple left to report in the tech earnings season, three major trends have emerged

Adobe Delivers Generative AI With Adobe Firefly At Adobe Summit on March 21, 2023, Adobe announced and delivered its generative AI offering known as Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly, is a collection of generative AI models built for creative applications. The offering joins the platform’s AI services. The first Firefly model will focus on image generation and text effects, trained on the hundreds of millions of Adobe stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe plans to integrate Firefly into their Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Express product lines.

The NASDAQ Composite closed out the week with its biggest two-day rally since 2008. CPI numbers hinted that inflation was subsiding and hope sprung that the Fed would take a less severe stance. Should the Fed hiking slow down from 75 basis points to 50 basis points, market watchers remain hopeful and some took advantage of the early signals of slowing inflation.

Disintermediate or Be Disintermediated On September 15, 2022, Adobe announced the largest acquisition of a private software company and the largest acquisition in Adobe’s history. In a half cash, half stock deal for approximately $20 billion, San Francisco-based Figma would be acquired by San Jose-headquartered Adobe. Adobe is paying a 50 times annualized recurring revenue (“ARR”) multiple for Figma which is expected to surpass $400 million in ARR exiting 2022.

Massive Dilemma In Taking Action As famously put by Peter Parker in Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility.". The digital giants are walking a thin-gauged tight rope.

Goodbye FAANG, Hello MATANA. The FAANG stocks (i.e. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) have had a great run as the large cap digital giant leaders. However, with Facebook and Netflix facing massive declines in year over year subscriber growth, their valuations have taken a hit along with the macro conditions of rising interest rates and global instability.

Microsoft's Biggest Acquisition Is All About Moving To Metaverse On January 18th, 2022, MIcrosoft announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in an all cash offer. As the metaverse economy heats up, this move gives MIcrosoft several advantages including:

Five Major Global ERP Vendors Join Shopify App Store Program On October 14th, 2021, Shopify announced a broad-based partnership with five leading ERP vendors to improve the data and workflow integration of Shopify Plus' commerce platform to key back office capabilities such as financials, order management, inventory, and supply chain.