Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
This is the last issue of the year. May your new year be filled with non-performative competence, pluralism, reason, universalism and vigor (a contrarian hope to be sure).
News
AI Marketing Hallucinations: AWS Edition
With generative AI, Amazon finds themselves on the wrong end of their favorite expression that “there is no compression algorithm for experience”. (And the evidence is growing that there is a ton of work that goes into model quality after the training is done, and sees benefits from scale, which makes it ever harder for laggards to catch up).
Amazon not only over-promised and under-delivered with their generative AI efforts at re:invent, they even managed to raise the expectations bar to claim only AWS could deliver some new nirvana of enterprise LLM capabilities. The immediate and egregious failure to do so badly hurts their credibility, not just for their insatiable desire to be seen as the generative AI leader, but also across all the areas where they actually do lead.
Previous:
AI Marketing Hallucinations: Google Edition
Google seems to have taken the AWS re:invent marketing approach as a challenge instead of a cautionary tale. Unlike Amazon, Google has largely managed to keep their generative AI insecurities to themselves (and as the original inventor of the transformer with a two hundred billion dollar advertising business, they have a lot more to be insecure about).
But as we hit a year since Google’s CEO may or may not have declared “Code Red” in response to ChatGPT (we did learn Google definitively has “Code Yellow“), they clearly felt compelled to do something. They announced their Gemini model, accompanied by two sneaky marketing moves where they got caught. One was a faked demo of their multi-modal capabilities and the other was comparing GPT-4 performance to the Gemini Ultra model which isn’t available.
What Comes After Titanium?
The Apple reseller (aka the phone companies) TV ads are amusing as the only thing they can find to say about the latest iPhones is “Titanium”.
Year End Reflections On Some Favorite Threads
- Cloud CAPEX – I will update the numbers after the clouds report in January, but CAPEX is all about the GPUs right now. And on the clown CAPEX front, it is almost time to call a winner in the clown car race.
- Cloud Repatriation – still not a thing. Sorry VCs who picked this as an investing theme.
- “SuperCloud” – has hit its two-year anniversary of not being a thing. Congratulations!!!
AI Alliance: Wah-Wah, Wah-Wah
Beyond the edgy white-on-black press release, what exactly should we expect from this august alliance beyond platitudes? The fact IBM is still pretending Red Hat is somehow an independent entity participating on their own accord suggests a greater focus on numbers than substance.
Software Migration Alert: VMware (Continued)
When private equity comes amalgamating, it is time to start migrating. Why? Because private equity ruins software companies.
VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram has left the building. He will be missed. So too apparently has the security talent, which also will be missed. As I’ve previously observed, private equity really struggles to model cybersecurity in their spreadsheets:
There is one area where private equity-owned software companies are showing uncharacteristic leadership: they’re at the epicenter of some of the largest cybersecurity breaches.
McKinsey Karma?
The John Oliver episode doesn’t cover all of McKinsey’s misdeeds, but does an excellent (and entertaining) job on the ones it does cover.
