27 ms·

The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession

130 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
I hadn't even been aware of Apple's App Tracking Transparency until now. I'm not sure how much it's driving the overall tech bust. There's no doubt that falling ad revenues, to which ATT is something of a contributor, is a big part of the downturn. Those that lean heavily on ad-driven revenue are leading, and not in a good way.
- todd3834 4y ago
  It has been brought up in the earnings reports for most ad tech companies since it was released. It’s been a massive impact. Anyone who wants to measure the impact of their ads is now competing with big players who can afford to spray and pray. You can no longer tell if someone saw your ad yesterday and decided to come to your website to buy it today.
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    Shiver me timbers
  - notyourwork 4y ago
    And I’m fine with that. Companies that support my privacy and respect boundaries can have all my money.
    - todd3834 4y ago
      I think most of us generally agree but it is interesting to see the impact. I’m curious how many people tap ”Allow app to track me”. Knowing what it used for and feeling like it isn’t _that_ big of a deal, I have never once given permission. It doesn’t feel like my problem so don’t track me.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      This is the opposite of "Buy Local" to those that care about that sort of thing, as Walmart can afford non-targeted ads vs. small mom-and-pop groceries.
  - bo1024 4y ago
    I would like to know more about who exactly is impacted. The article mentions that Nike's revenue is way up, so I guess they weren't hurt too bad by less targeted advertisement. Is it only adtech that is damaged here, or adtech's customers?
    - todd3834 4y ago
      My guess would be that most of the small margin advertisers can’t afford these traffic channels anymore. Anyone who can’t afford to attribute traffic at a wider scale.
      - morelisp 4y ago
        It's both adtech and adtech's customers who are getting hurt. Small/mid sized adtech (and eventually any not directly attached to a platform) can't do shit anymore. Small/mid sized customers therefore have to go to the bigger platforms (YouTube and Facebook, notably) to get anything decent. They're paying more for less, and power is concentrating in the big adtech players further. The flip side is, security of personal data is on average significantly better. But overall privacy seems like a wash or marginally worse, to become significantly worse once monopoly abuses kick in.
  - shostack 4y ago
    Big players aren't "spraying and praying" by and large. This is a common misconception. They often have spend large enough to do properly controlled (long term/geo hold outs, etc) statistical experiments to determine incremental lift with MMM and such. Is there some waste? Sure. But certainly no worse (and likely better) than small businesses who don't have the volume who are paying for clicks without proper incrementality based measurement.
    - todd3834 4y ago
      Good point! I’ll refine my statement and simply suggest that those with smaller margins are unable to afford to do this same thing.
      - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        And specifically, they could afford to start advertising, safe in the knowledge that they'd make the most of their tiny budget. It's pretty sad what has happened to lots of niche businesses since the ATT change.
- yardie 4y ago
  It's going to be fascinating to watch the influencer economy really take off. Customers, such as myself, are looking to brands they trust. At first I was dismissive of the influencer economy, but now that I'm doing more of my own research I draw from their experiences and recommendations. And I ignore ads that are pushed at me.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Influencers talking about stuff are ads. They're just a different channel.
    - yardie 4y ago
      Yes, I know they are ads. But it is the difference between push and pull. Consumer Reports is the oldest influencer style. But you go there seeking information on things you are interested in buying. But once you've completed your purchase you almost never have to look at it again. This is the opposite of what we consider ads. You start with a small interest and for months afterwards you're bombarded with similar products.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        I've found it to be extremely difficult to differentiate between 'push' and 'pull' because you're almost never aware as a mark of how far the chain of influencing your really goes. It is very well possible that whatever put you on track of the influencer in the first place was already part of the campaign and it may well extend into your private life in ways that are difficult to discern. That conversation you overheard in the elevator? That 'chance' youtube video linked to you? Some on twitter making an off hand remark? That visit to a website or a physical store with your smartphone? All of these and more are part of paid campaigns.
  - baal80spam 4y ago
    > It's going to be fascinating to watch the influencer economy really take off. I hope I'll never see it happen. Also, I don't trust any brands. Maybe that's because I was born and live in a post-soviet country but I assume everyone wants to rip me off.
- jldugger 4y ago
  Facebook was kicking and screaming about it, they effectively got it delayed, and when it did it pretty much capped them.
notjustanymike 4y ago
I'm not sure where an AI generated horse with not-quite-right-looking horseman factors into this, but I strongly suspect we'll call him Flood.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  the billions of horsemen generated per second -- Flame
seydor 4y ago
> (and will forever), but it isn’t the dominant factor in the economy. Just looking at the long-term effects, it seems like covid could be the driver for (healthcare) economy for the decade onwards
eklitzke 4y ago
It's the Book of Revelation, not Revelations.
- danielvf 4y ago
  I went digging on this, because I thought you were wrong. Turns out the official book name is indeed singular, and in fact I tracked this singular usage all the way back to Athanasius 39th festal letter in AD 367, listing the accepted books of the New Testament - "the Revelation of John". "The Revelation" is also the first word of the book in greek. (Ἀποκάλυψις or apokalypsis) So thanks for the enjoyable rabbit trail.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ergonaught 4y ago
> flush with stimulus checks This notion of people just balling because their stimulus checks is increasingly tiresome, has always been disconnected from reality, needs to die. How far do you think those things went? You know, for normal people? I only ever see this comment from folks (mostly Republican politicians until now) with zero understanding of the subject. Boggling.
- alangibson 4y ago
  So very this. Anyone making this argument is secretly moralizing about economics. They can't stand the fact that "the government just gave away money to a bunch freeloaders."
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I agree with GP, but people should be able to make an argument without others second-guessing their intentions.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Why?
      - pffft8888 4y ago
        Precisely.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    The only people secretly moralizing about economics is this chain of comments. The article never claimed that people were "bailing" or "freeloading" because of stimulus checks. It said that they were increasing consumer spending, which is objectively true and literally the entire point of them.
  - reedjosh 4y ago
    > ... can't stand the fact that "the government just gave away money to a bunch freeloaders." I kind of feel this way, but about the free money given to corporations that didn't really need it -- not individuals.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Without commenting on the bulk of the article, the opener is a good reminder for this audience: something like 96% of employed people are not in the high tech industry. Our personal mental context for employment is emphatically not typical. I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.
- buggy6257 4y ago
  > the high tech industry I know you didn't mean it this way, but my morning brain read "high tech industry" as a "high elf vs regular elf" thing and it made it sound pretty funny. I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    > I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry". I mean... a good chunk of Silicon Valley does live in a fantasy world. ;)
    - Izkata 4y ago
      My new title shall be Technomage.
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        Sounds good! Just one friendly piece of advice if you don't mind: do not be fooled by one's own intuition. Technomages need high charisma more than they need intelligence or wisdom. (I wrote this joke and then realized that it's actually probably kind of true...)
        buggy6257 4y ago
        Nah, techno SORCERERS need high CHA. Mages and Wizards use INT. Priests use WIS (something something coding holy wars).
ghaff 4y ago
>That high end did not materialize: when I covered that earnings call Amazon’s retail growth had pretty much reverted to what it was trending towards pre-pandemic; the last two quarters have been down significantly A general theme I see is that, while a lot of businesses did accelerate digitization in various ways (much of which isn't obvious to consumers), in general, a (mostly) post-COVID world looks a lot more like a pre-COVID world than a lot of people expected. Travel's pretty much back to 2019 levels. People who weren't getting groceries delivered or picking up curbside pre-COVID, pretty much aren't today. Traffic is as bad as ever. Etc.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Is that true for WFH too? It seems to me that that's one bell that won't be completely unrung. Companies took advantage of WFH to hire outside of their metro, so even those that are forcing their employees back into the office are having trouble making it work.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In general, I think there's more flexibility in many white collar jobs than there was. But I also think tech is something of a bubble. Certainly, on the rare occasions I go into the nearest major city at rush hour, traffic seems as bad as it's ever been--though some of that may be that fewer people seem to use the commuter rail and other public transit than in the past.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      In my circle, tech workers are being forced back into the office more than government workers. But government is its own bubble.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I don't have any real personal visibility--and work for a tech company that has been very remote-friendly for a long time--but I can imagine that, given government salaries being generally lower than industry, it's almost forced to be remote-friendly where practical.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
What I don't understand is why Thought leaders like Stratechery didn't see this coming? Did they ever write about these "4 horsemen" before these recent events? If not, they seem to fall under the category of IYI which NNTaleb talks about.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Did you verify that he said he didn't predict this? It looks like he says he pretty much did predict most of these things in previous articles. The fourth one in particular is basically just a rehash of a previous article he wrote. And certainly many pundits have predicted a tech recession for a long time. If anything, it's the safest thing to predict, because there will always be one coming in the future.
- ghaff 4y ago
  There was a pretty widespread belief that there was going to be a "new normal." And, while I'm not sure that's totally incorrect, it's mostly in relatively subtle ways and I'm not sure typical consumer behavior has really changed all that much.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  "IYI"?
  - SmellyPotato22 4y ago
    "intellectual yet idiot" a term from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)
  - deadso 4y ago
    IYI: Intellectual, yet idiot NNTaleb: Naseem Nicholas Taleb
didgetmaster 4y ago
COVID itself was not one of the horsemen, but rather governments' reaction to it. Shutdowns, mandates, school closings, etc. are what caused 95% of the problems. The vast majority the deaths and hospitalizations were older folks who were well into their retirement years. There were exceptions to this to be sure, but if you look at the data this was the case. I don't blame the over-reaction that happened early on when the pandemic first began and people were unsure of what it really was; but it became very obvious after just a few months that young, healthy people were at minimal risk. Still, the politicians decided that it was a 'crisis that couldn't go to waste' and exploited it to the max. We are still suffering, not from COVID itself, but from the reaction to it.
- wbl 4y ago
  The only thing really shut down were schools.
  - didgetmaster 4y ago
    ...and cruise ships, and restaurants, and theaters, and government buildings, and...
    - wbl 4y ago
      Restaurants and theaters were open in the summer of 2020.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Yes, we should have sacrificed millions more old people for the sake of the stock market. Our billionaires really need the help.
  - didgetmaster 4y ago
    No. We should have done more to protect those who were actually the most vulnerable instead of doing things like insisting that first graders wear a mask all day in class. In case you didn't notice, the over-reaction (including shutdowns) caused the stock market to rise significantly during the first two years of the pandemic so the opposite of your comment actually happened.
minhduong243 4y ago
I have several issues with the points made in this article First is the Hardware cycle which the author admitted himself is a stretch. Because it is. So not sure why it is there Second, the slower growth of AWS and Azure, how can we be sure if it's because of increased interest rates and not because of big numbers laws? AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? I am sure interest rates have some impact but it should not be the sole reason for slower growth. AWS is still growing and very profitable. Third, claiming ATT fixed a problem that doesn't exist is not correct. Surveillance tracking without user consent is a real problem. Last, when Jassy said advertising, did he mention mobile advertising though? Mobile advertising does not mean every type of advertising. If there is no data, how does he know ATT's impact was underestimated? Financial Times ran an article claiming that ATT's impact on FB was about $10 billion. There was no link to the research or article for that number. FB ran away with that number and made the same claim. But even if that number were true, FB still has billions of users and generates a lot of money. Plus, they already lapped the period impacted by ATT. What investors were worried about is Mark's obsession with VR and the big investments into the field. The layoff is FB's attempt to be leaner and recover investor trust. So I am not sure why ATT is even in the discussion. Feels like some of these points are forced...
- TrainedMonkey 4y ago
  > AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? More generally there are two types of growth - market growth (new customers) and net-zero growth (taking customers from the competitor). The hyper growth generally comes from both of those being quite high, but almost by definition the net-zero growth one will eventually shrink to zero. Likewise, market growth will slow down after all the low hanging fruit for market growth are exhausted (this is generally conversion from existing older tech for efficiency gains).
- scarface74 4y ago
  Re: how fast can AWS grow Jassy himself has said numerous times in public that less than 5% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider. He also mentioned that Dell has a much higher revenue than AWS. In the grand scheme of things, AWS’s revenue is not that large. Disclaimer: Jassy is my (skip * 7 manager). I work at AWS.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fellowmartian 4y ago
Here’s another possible explanation: the “soaring” employment figures might not be accurate.
jldugger 4y ago
> Every company that relies on performance marketing, from Snap to YouTube to Meta to Shopify has seen its revenue growth crash from the moment ATT came into force in late 2021, even as companies and products that were isolated from its effects, from Amazon to Google to Apple advertising has seen growth "Fun" fact: (part of?) Tim Cook's incentive plan is based on the delta between Apple and the S&P 500 index.
brodouevencode 4y ago
Initial response is that most tech people, especially in the valley, live in a bubble. But beyond that: interest rates are far and above the most responsible for the current hits. This has been the case for a long time - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-that-arkk-continues-to-sink https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-tha.... The other three reasons are sort of secondary to this.
computing 4y ago
The thing about Stratechery is that it generally sounds really smart (and therefore correct) IFF you are not an expert in the topic discussed. But if you are an expert, you notice that Ben is often very wrong in his analysis. Makes you question your trust in the rest of this views.
- ploppyploppy 4y ago
  Do you have any decent examples of where he's been very wrong in his analysis?
  - tubs 4y ago
    Apple silicon
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pornel 4y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  [dead]
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
[dead]
knewter 4y ago
Imagine shutting down the entire economy and then pontificating how it could have gone better

130 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

I hadn't even been aware of Apple's App Tracking Transparency until now. I'm not sure how much it's driving the overall tech bust. There's no doubt that falling ad revenues, to which ATT is something of a contributor, is a big part of the downturn. Those that lean heavily on ad-driven revenue are leading, and not in a good way.

todd3834 4y ago
It has been brought up in the earnings reports for most ad tech companies since it was released. It’s been a massive impact. Anyone who wants to measure the impact of their ads is now competing with big players who can afford to spray and pray. You can no longer tell if someone saw your ad yesterday and decided to come to your website to buy it today.
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  Shiver me timbers
- notyourwork 4y ago
  And I’m fine with that. Companies that support my privacy and respect boundaries can have all my money.
  - todd3834 4y ago
    I think most of us generally agree but it is interesting to see the impact. I’m curious how many people tap ”Allow app to track me”. Knowing what it used for and feeling like it isn’t _that_ big of a deal, I have never once given permission. It doesn’t feel like my problem so don’t track me.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    This is the opposite of "Buy Local" to those that care about that sort of thing, as Walmart can afford non-targeted ads vs. small mom-and-pop groceries.
- bo1024 4y ago
  I would like to know more about who exactly is impacted. The article mentions that Nike's revenue is way up, so I guess they weren't hurt too bad by less targeted advertisement. Is it only adtech that is damaged here, or adtech's customers?
  - todd3834 4y ago
    My guess would be that most of the small margin advertisers can’t afford these traffic channels anymore. Anyone who can’t afford to attribute traffic at a wider scale.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      It's both adtech and adtech's customers who are getting hurt. Small/mid sized adtech (and eventually any not directly attached to a platform) can't do shit anymore. Small/mid sized customers therefore have to go to the bigger platforms (YouTube and Facebook, notably) to get anything decent. They're paying more for less, and power is concentrating in the big adtech players further. The flip side is, security of personal data is on average significantly better. But overall privacy seems like a wash or marginally worse, to become significantly worse once monopoly abuses kick in.
- shostack 4y ago
  Big players aren't "spraying and praying" by and large. This is a common misconception. They often have spend large enough to do properly controlled (long term/geo hold outs, etc) statistical experiments to determine incremental lift with MMM and such. Is there some waste? Sure. But certainly no worse (and likely better) than small businesses who don't have the volume who are paying for clicks without proper incrementality based measurement.
  - todd3834 4y ago
    Good point! I’ll refine my statement and simply suggest that those with smaller margins are unable to afford to do this same thing.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      And specifically, they could afford to start advertising, safe in the knowledge that they'd make the most of their tiny budget. It's pretty sad what has happened to lots of niche businesses since the ATT change.
yardie 4y ago
It's going to be fascinating to watch the influencer economy really take off. Customers, such as myself, are looking to brands they trust. At first I was dismissive of the influencer economy, but now that I'm doing more of my own research I draw from their experiences and recommendations. And I ignore ads that are pushed at me.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Influencers talking about stuff are ads. They're just a different channel.
  - yardie 4y ago
    Yes, I know they are ads. But it is the difference between push and pull. Consumer Reports is the oldest influencer style. But you go there seeking information on things you are interested in buying. But once you've completed your purchase you almost never have to look at it again. This is the opposite of what we consider ads. You start with a small interest and for months afterwards you're bombarded with similar products.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      I've found it to be extremely difficult to differentiate between 'push' and 'pull' because you're almost never aware as a mark of how far the chain of influencing your really goes. It is very well possible that whatever put you on track of the influencer in the first place was already part of the campaign and it may well extend into your private life in ways that are difficult to discern. That conversation you overheard in the elevator? That 'chance' youtube video linked to you? Some on twitter making an off hand remark? That visit to a website or a physical store with your smartphone? All of these and more are part of paid campaigns.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  > It's going to be fascinating to watch the influencer economy really take off. I hope I'll never see it happen. Also, I don't trust any brands. Maybe that's because I was born and live in a post-soviet country but I assume everyone wants to rip me off.
jldugger 4y ago
Facebook was kicking and screaming about it, they effectively got it delayed, and when it did it pretty much capped them.

notjustanymike 4y ago

I'm not sure where an AI generated horse with not-quite-right-looking horseman factors into this, but I strongly suspect we'll call him Flood.

mistrial9 4y ago
the billions of horsemen generated per second -- Flame

seydor 4y ago

> (and will forever), but it isn’t the dominant factor in the economy. Just looking at the long-term effects, it seems like covid could be the driver for (healthcare) economy for the decade onwards

eklitzke 4y ago

It's the Book of Revelation, not Revelations.

danielvf 4y ago
I went digging on this, because I thought you were wrong. Turns out the official book name is indeed singular, and in fact I tracked this singular usage all the way back to Athanasius 39th festal letter in AD 367, listing the accepted books of the New Testament - "the Revelation of John". "The Revelation" is also the first word of the book in greek. (Ἀποκάλυψις or apokalypsis) So thanks for the enjoyable rabbit trail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ergonaught 4y ago

> flush with stimulus checks This notion of people just balling because their stimulus checks is increasingly tiresome, has always been disconnected from reality, needs to die. How far do you think those things went? You know, for normal people? I only ever see this comment from folks (mostly Republican politicians until now) with zero understanding of the subject. Boggling.

alangibson 4y ago
So very this. Anyone making this argument is secretly moralizing about economics. They can't stand the fact that "the government just gave away money to a bunch freeloaders."
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I agree with GP, but people should be able to make an argument without others second-guessing their intentions.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Why?
    - pffft8888 4y ago
      Precisely.
- Aunche 4y ago
  The only people secretly moralizing about economics is this chain of comments. The article never claimed that people were "bailing" or "freeloading" because of stimulus checks. It said that they were increasing consumer spending, which is objectively true and literally the entire point of them.
- reedjosh 4y ago
  > ... can't stand the fact that "the government just gave away money to a bunch freeloaders." I kind of feel this way, but about the free money given to corporations that didn't really need it -- not individuals.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Without commenting on the bulk of the article, the opener is a good reminder for this audience: something like 96% of employed people are not in the high tech industry. Our personal mental context for employment is emphatically not typical. I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.

buggy6257 4y ago
> the high tech industry I know you didn't mean it this way, but my morning brain read "high tech industry" as a "high elf vs regular elf" thing and it made it sound pretty funny. I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  > I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry". I mean... a good chunk of Silicon Valley does live in a fantasy world. ;)
  - Izkata 4y ago
    My new title shall be Technomage.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Sounds good! Just one friendly piece of advice if you don't mind: do not be fooled by one's own intuition. Technomages need high charisma more than they need intelligence or wisdom. (I wrote this joke and then realized that it's actually probably kind of true...)
      - buggy6257 4y ago
        Nah, techno SORCERERS need high CHA. Mages and Wizards use INT. Priests use WIS (something something coding holy wars).

ghaff 4y ago

>That high end did not materialize: when I covered that earnings call Amazon’s retail growth had pretty much reverted to what it was trending towards pre-pandemic; the last two quarters have been down significantly A general theme I see is that, while a lot of businesses did accelerate digitization in various ways (much of which isn't obvious to consumers), in general, a (mostly) post-COVID world looks a lot more like a pre-COVID world than a lot of people expected. Travel's pretty much back to 2019 levels. People who weren't getting groceries delivered or picking up curbside pre-COVID, pretty much aren't today. Traffic is as bad as ever. Etc.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Is that true for WFH too? It seems to me that that's one bell that won't be completely unrung. Companies took advantage of WFH to hire outside of their metro, so even those that are forcing their employees back into the office are having trouble making it work.
- ghaff 4y ago
  In general, I think there's more flexibility in many white collar jobs than there was. But I also think tech is something of a bubble. Certainly, on the rare occasions I go into the nearest major city at rush hour, traffic seems as bad as it's ever been--though some of that may be that fewer people seem to use the commuter rail and other public transit than in the past.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    In my circle, tech workers are being forced back into the office more than government workers. But government is its own bubble.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I don't have any real personal visibility--and work for a tech company that has been very remote-friendly for a long time--but I can imagine that, given government salaries being generally lower than industry, it's almost forced to be remote-friendly where practical.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

What I don't understand is why Thought leaders like Stratechery didn't see this coming? Did they ever write about these "4 horsemen" before these recent events? If not, they seem to fall under the category of IYI which NNTaleb talks about.

karaterobot 4y ago
Did you verify that he said he didn't predict this? It looks like he says he pretty much did predict most of these things in previous articles. The fourth one in particular is basically just a rehash of a previous article he wrote. And certainly many pundits have predicted a tech recession for a long time. If anything, it's the safest thing to predict, because there will always be one coming in the future.
ghaff 4y ago
There was a pretty widespread belief that there was going to be a "new normal." And, while I'm not sure that's totally incorrect, it's mostly in relatively subtle ways and I'm not sure typical consumer behavior has really changed all that much.
everybodyknows 4y ago
"IYI"?
- SmellyPotato22 4y ago
  "intellectual yet idiot" a term from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)
- deadso 4y ago
  IYI: Intellectual, yet idiot NNTaleb: Naseem Nicholas Taleb

didgetmaster 4y ago

COVID itself was not one of the horsemen, but rather governments' reaction to it. Shutdowns, mandates, school closings, etc. are what caused 95% of the problems. The vast majority the deaths and hospitalizations were older folks who were well into their retirement years. There were exceptions to this to be sure, but if you look at the data this was the case. I don't blame the over-reaction that happened early on when the pandemic first began and people were unsure of what it really was; but it became very obvious after just a few months that young, healthy people were at minimal risk. Still, the politicians decided that it was a 'crisis that couldn't go to waste' and exploited it to the max. We are still suffering, not from COVID itself, but from the reaction to it.

wbl 4y ago
The only thing really shut down were schools.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  ...and cruise ships, and restaurants, and theaters, and government buildings, and...
  - wbl 4y ago
    Restaurants and theaters were open in the summer of 2020.
babypuncher 4y ago
Yes, we should have sacrificed millions more old people for the sake of the stock market. Our billionaires really need the help.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  No. We should have done more to protect those who were actually the most vulnerable instead of doing things like insisting that first graders wear a mask all day in class. In case you didn't notice, the over-reaction (including shutdowns) caused the stock market to rise significantly during the first two years of the pandemic so the opposite of your comment actually happened.

minhduong243 4y ago

I have several issues with the points made in this article First is the Hardware cycle which the author admitted himself is a stretch. Because it is. So not sure why it is there Second, the slower growth of AWS and Azure, how can we be sure if it's because of increased interest rates and not because of big numbers laws? AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? I am sure interest rates have some impact but it should not be the sole reason for slower growth. AWS is still growing and very profitable. Third, claiming ATT fixed a problem that doesn't exist is not correct. Surveillance tracking without user consent is a real problem. Last, when Jassy said advertising, did he mention mobile advertising though? Mobile advertising does not mean every type of advertising. If there is no data, how does he know ATT's impact was underestimated? Financial Times ran an article claiming that ATT's impact on FB was about $10 billion. There was no link to the research or article for that number. FB ran away with that number and made the same claim. But even if that number were true, FB still has billions of users and generates a lot of money. Plus, they already lapped the period impacted by ATT. What investors were worried about is Mark's obsession with VR and the big investments into the field. The layoff is FB's attempt to be leaner and recover investor trust. So I am not sure why ATT is even in the discussion. Feels like some of these points are forced...

TrainedMonkey 4y ago
> AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? More generally there are two types of growth - market growth (new customers) and net-zero growth (taking customers from the competitor). The hyper growth generally comes from both of those being quite high, but almost by definition the net-zero growth one will eventually shrink to zero. Likewise, market growth will slow down after all the low hanging fruit for market growth are exhausted (this is generally conversion from existing older tech for efficiency gains).
scarface74 4y ago
Re: how fast can AWS grow Jassy himself has said numerous times in public that less than 5% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider. He also mentioned that Dell has a much higher revenue than AWS. In the grand scheme of things, AWS’s revenue is not that large. Disclaimer: Jassy is my (skip * 7 manager). I work at AWS.

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fellowmartian 4y ago

Here’s another possible explanation: the “soaring” employment figures might not be accurate.

jldugger 4y ago

> Every company that relies on performance marketing, from Snap to YouTube to Meta to Shopify has seen its revenue growth crash from the moment ATT came into force in late 2021, even as companies and products that were isolated from its effects, from Amazon to Google to Apple advertising has seen growth "Fun" fact: (part of?) Tim Cook's incentive plan is based on the delta between Apple and the S&P 500 index.

brodouevencode 4y ago

Initial response is that most tech people, especially in the valley, live in a bubble. But beyond that: interest rates are far and above the most responsible for the current hits. This has been the case for a long time - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-that-arkk-continues-to-sink https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-tha.... The other three reasons are sort of secondary to this.

computing 4y ago

The thing about Stratechery is that it generally sounds really smart (and therefore correct) IFF you are not an expert in the topic discussed. But if you are an expert, you notice that Ben is often very wrong in his analysis. Makes you question your trust in the rest of this views.

ploppyploppy 4y ago
Do you have any decent examples of where he's been very wrong in his analysis?
- tubs 4y ago
  Apple silicon
deleted 4y ago
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pornel 4y ago
Gell-Mann Amnesia.
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
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TheRealNGenius 4y ago

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knewter 4y ago

Imagine shutting down the entire economy and then pontificating how it could have gone better