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I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Yesterday, Google & Amazon announced earnings which completes the picture. Growth will continue to slow this year.

A year ago, AWS, GCP, & Azure averaged 44% annual growth. Today, that figure has dropped to 27%. Amazon also guided to lower growth rates in the future.

Amazon: We expect [customer] optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters. So far in the first month of the year, AWS year-over-year revenue growth is in the mid-teens.

In his most recent earnings conference call, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said “Every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product.” Today, Microsoft Teams launched AI features in Teams for a fee. Teams will summarize meetings, create chapters in those meetings, extract tasks, translate in real time, & develop templates for future meetings.

Incumbents have lept onto advances in generative machine learning more aggressively than any trend in recent technology history. Mobile, cloud, social - startups led each of those waves.

100 years ago, fluorescent lamps & suspended ceilings topped the list of hottest trends in office design. In 1928, San Antonio’s Milam Building claimed the honor of the first office skyscraper with air conditioning.

Twenty-five years later, window-encased skyscrapers with internal glass walls distinguished the modern office. Employees ensconced in the Lever House & the Seagram Building in New York enjoyed more daylight at work than any other Manhattanite.

Another generation would pass before the open office plan bulldozed walls separating managers & employees. Robert Probst conceived & George Nelson designed the Action Office - the iconic aluminum, wooden veneer, & black plastic desks of the 1980s.

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

The transcript highlights the major trends in software of 2023. Below, I’ve listed those trends with data & excerpts from the earnings call transcript.

1. Enterprises Have Slowed their Spending, Decelerating Further in December:

Growth is down 15 percentage points or about a third in a year.

The current wave of layoffs, a difficult component of the innovation boom/bust cycle, differs from the previous years’ dynamics.

B2B companies have reduced headcount to a greater extent than at any time since 2020.

In the last three years, B2C startups’ ratio of layoffs have dwarfed B2B layoffs. In 2020, B2C companies cut 8.8x the number of B2B employees. 3.8x in 2021, & 6.9x in 2022.

Most massive software companies structure themselves with an office of the CEO, which allocates capital to different business units. Within each business unit, a general manager operates one or more products.

There are three paths I’ve seen to achieve this scale:

1. The dominant path of the last ten years: focus on a single product until the company is roughly at $100m in ARR, then build adjacent products. Snowflake, DataDog, Zendesk, CrowdStrike etc.
2. Build a financial holding company acquiring lots of small businesses & use the profits to acquire more businesses. Constellation Software.
3. Develop multiple products from Day One. This is called a suite strategy: Zoho published a history of the 2-4 product launches per year, which illustrates the idea.

“The Startup M&A Market Fell 94% Year over Year - But One Segment Thrives”, a post from last week, elicited the same question from many readers.

Just who are the most active acquirers for smaller takeouts?

To answer the question. I reviewed the roughly 560 US software acquisitions under $400m since January 1, 2020.

I’d like to have a hero image atop each blog post.

Readers dwell for a few seconds longer on blog posts with images. Plus, images garner more interest across social media.

I wondered how the current wave of generative AI image makers like Midjourney, Dall-E, & Stable Diffusion would fare creating images for a few of my posts.

Here are the results. The format is blog post, the prompt issued to the algorithm, & some commentary.

Frank Bien at Looker kicked off each year with a theme.

A decade later, I still remember them. These themes focused the company & the board. The management team wove that theme through every board deck during the year. I imagine the internal messaging prioritized it, too.

One year, he dubbed the Year of the Hound. Looker had focused on technical data teams as its ideal customer profile for the early years.

The US startup M&A market in Q4 2022 was one of the quietest in the last 20 years. It rivals the dotcom bust & Global Financial Crisis for its paucity. In percentage terms, last quarter dropped the most since 2000, falling 94% year-over-year.

US venture-backed M&A fell from $34.6b in Q4 2021 to a paltry $2.1b in Q4 2022.