There are moments in the history of technology driving the economy when the fortunes of whole industries, and even of countries, depend upon a single product. Smartphones is a good example. Microsoft’s inability to gain traction in this market had a terrific negative impact not only on Microsoft, but also on Intel, and on Nokia. Since Nokia once represented about one-fifth of the entire Finnish equity market, this failure affected Finland as well.
Personal assistants are in a similar gatekeeper position, and autonomous electric cars will be another (see “SNS: What Is a Car? Part II,” 3/8/18) – and China, Germany, and the US will be fighting over it for years to come.
Data centers, now morphed into different “cloud” offerings by different companies, represent the fastest-growing and largest pool of both revenues and earnings on the technology landscape: all the major tech firms are now cloud vendors. The cloud has become the leverage point for an entire industry, with the costs and benefits of winning or losing becoming an existential issue for CEOs.
For these reasons, SNS members will likely have taken notice when, virtually overnight, every cloud vendor suddenly rebranded its service as “AI Cloud.” Today there are no longer any cloud vendors, but there is a fast-growing list of “AI Cloud” companies.
The point of this week’s discussion is to explore how and why this happened so quickly, and where it leads us in terms of market threats and opportunities.
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