Month: May 2021
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EVs, Musk, Biden and Homer Simpson
Joe Biden’s EV fever dream can’t become reality without the U.S. investing heavily in nuclear energy. Are Americans ready to have that conversation? Electricity comes from the wall unit of course but what is the source of that current? We updated our electricity source table (below), courtesy of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural Gas,…
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Amazon & MGM? Bezos & Bond?
Amazon has likely done the math and concluded that acquiring a proven film library (MGM owns the rights to the Bond franchise) has a superior risk reward as compared to building a content library from scratch. It remains to be seen how competitive such a prospective deal would be as Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger…
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AT&T Took Our Advice But It Does Not Solve The Scale Problem
Will Apple, Disney or Netflix pursue an acquisition of NewCo? Last year we wrote that AT&T should sell WarnerMedia. On Monday AT&T (tkr: T) led by John Stankey agreed to spin-off its WarnerMedia asset and to combine it with John Malone’s Discovery (tkr: DISCA) in a new, publicly-traded company led by Discovery CEO David Zaslav.…
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PayPal’s Google Cloud Relationship Could Foreshadow A Future Deal
PayPal recently announced that it is moving core applications to Google Cloud. The PayPal Google Cloud relationship is not new (read more here). However, what is interesting to us is that Bill Ready (Google Commerce leader having joined Google in January 2020) is PayPal’s former COO. Further, Google Commerce could use a boost in its…
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Amazon Pharmacy Is Ramping Up Its Marketing Effort
We expect Amazon Pharmacy to take market share by providing consumers with price comparison capability, health information and related health services. We have noticed an uptick in Amazon Pharmacy YouTube Ads this week. The Amazon Pharmacy business unit is led by PillPack (Amazon acquired PillPack in 2018 for approximately $1 billion), co-founder T.J. Parker. In…
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Treasury Wants More Consumer Spending
One news item that caught our eye this week was that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (a division of Treasury) wants banks to extend credit to those who lack credit history. Banks plan to share some consumer data with each other in order to build enough history to justify extending credit. Smells…
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More Lines To Come With Price Controls
It is starting to feel like the 1970’s with out of control fiscal spending, inflation and now gas lines. We only have gas lines in certain parts of the country today as local government officials exercised gas price controls during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. We could very well see similar price control policies from the…
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Inflation and Regulation Will Accelerate Adoption of Advanced Automation
Our past two articles focused on Advanced Automation manifested through the application of broadly-defined Artificial Intelligence as applied to Enterprise Software. Continuing the Advanced Automation theme, we expect food producers, automobile producers, retailers and other operations to accelerate their adoption of various forms of advanced automation including Robotics and automated payments (think Amazon Go’s cashierless…
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The AI CEO vs. The Cyborg CEO
Sophisticated Quant models run billion-dollar portfolios. Autonomous vehicles are on the road. AIs write music. AIs read maps and satellite images for the military. So when may an AI realistically lead a company as CEO? If one considers a large company such as Microsoft (tkr: MSFT), CEO Satya Nadella does not spend his days writing…
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AI-Powered Decision Support Capability Is Only Scratching The Surface
Enterprise Software applications will increasingly incorporate AI to guide users by providing them with real-time actionable information. Such applications will generate enormous value assuming they are able to effectively inform users without becoming an overly-used crutch. Think of the benefit such applications may provide employees that lack customer-specific knowledge, process knowledge, domain expertise and/or general…
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