Microsoft – Dream Team

Good luck and good timing give great results. Microsoft is backing away from bundling Teams with Office 365 which I expect will have no impact at all on its use and popularity as it is now popular enough that the network effect alone will continue to ensure its success. Microsoft has announced that it will no longer bundle Teams with...

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Arm vs. Qualcomm – Preamble

A situation that makes little sense. The dispute between Arm and Qualcomm is one of the more bizarre that I have seen in my time, but it is descending into the usual tit-for-tat which is likely to end in a settlement at some point. What is unusual in this case is that Arm opened hostilities right before its IPO (where...

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TSMC Q1 2023 – Yin and Yang.

Inventory correction offset by China. TSMC reported weak Q1 2023 results and guided down expectations, but this had been anticipated which combined with some initial positive signs on the Chinese economy, sets up a better H2 2023. Q1 2023 revenues / EPS were TWD 507bn / TWD 7.98 representing incremental growth from Q1 2022 but down significantly from Q4 2022...

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Tesla Q1 23 – Normalisation.

A promise that will never come true. The promise of fantastically profitable robotaxis will never come true meaning that lower margins as Tesla falls into line with the rest of the industry are probably here to stay. Hence, the valuation remains orders of magnitude higher than it should be. Tesla reported reasonable results with Q1 2023 revenues / Adj-EPS of...

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Artificial Intelligence – The wall.

Now the real work begins. OpenAI has admitted that the limitations of massive compute and massive data may have already been reached meaning that to make these systems useful, ways need to be found to implement them cheaply and make them less crazy. At an event last week at MIT, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI admitted that making the...

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Google vs. ChatGPT – Scroogled again? pt. II

Bing chat is not ChatGPT. Samsung is weighing up a switch to Bing on the basis that its GPT-generated search results are better than Google’s which is a proposition that I think has little basis in reality. Google is currently the default search engine on both Samsung Android devices and Apple devices which is a reflection that in the current...

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GM – The Fourth Estate

GM’s biggest problem is the media. GMs decision to end support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto has sparked a negative reaction from the Apple-loving technology press that seems to have put finger to keyboard to generate clicks rather than to inform. GM has announced that its EVs from mid-2024 will no longer support Apple CarPlay or Android Auto which,...

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Semiconductors – Game of subsidies

No one is thinking about economics at the moment. It looks like Intel’s requests for more subsidies to build leading-edge fabs in Germany will pay off, but the subsidies are still likely to be below those available in Asia once again underlining that semiconductors right now are all about geopolitics and not economics. Intel is currently in line to receive...

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Ouster – Dire Straits.

Money for nothing and company for free. Falling long-term estimates and substantial dilution have materially damaged the long-term outlook for the share price but the shares have fallen so much that there is enough upside even at a greatly reduced share price forecast to consider rounding down. Ouster has had a rough 18 months and the combination of difficult end...

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Alibaba – ChatCCP

CCP hurts the bug, not the feature. AI proponents will look at the immediate clampdown on large language model (LLM) chatbots by the CCP with dismay, but I think that for the use cases that I have identified for these systems, it won’t make much difference. At its 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Alibaba announced an LLM-based chatbot called Tonyi Qianwen...

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