Dana Blankenhorn

Moore’s Third Law

What other analysts call “big tech” I refer to as “Cloud Czars.”

I do it for a reason.

What distinguishes Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook isn’t their managements’ “ruthlessness.” It’s their heavy investment, over many years, in cloud computing centers.

Even early in the 2010s, it took $1 billion of capital each quarter to get into the cloud market. That has only increased with time. Now it averages $4 billion each quarter.

The money must come from somewhere. Cloud is a capital-intensive business. If you’re handing out dividends, it’s because you don’t know what else to do with the shareholders’ cash.

The 1944 Game

Where are we in terms of confronting the Trump Crisis, the great political challenge of our lives?

In terms of my parents’ generation I’d say we’re in 1944. In terms of their ancestors, it’s 1864.

We’ve passed the turning point. The death of George Floyd, the botched response to COVID-19, and the Administration’s response combined to help us turn a corner, as when the graph of the Georgia pandemic peaks at a great height and seems to turn. They were D-Day.

But we haven’t won yet. And we’re exhausted now, just as we were then.

My family is especially pessimistic. They see Trump controlling the agenda, they see his acolytes running police and the military, they fear the 2020 election won’t happen. These are reasonable fears.

But we had similar fears back in the day, easy to see by just looking at what people were doing at the time.

Movie goers remember 1944 for Going My Way,” with Bing Crosby,  or Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland, movies where the war had little or no role. It’s also remembered as the year of Bogie and Bacall, in To Have or Have Not.  Film noir, created mostly by German emigres, was rising even as the war ground on.