Starship, the fully reusable rocket under development by SpaceX, is a revolution the industry grossly under-appreciates. So goes this fascinating blog post.
“Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift.“
“Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year) … Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon.“
It is developing in leaps – “Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.“
Counter to the prevailing narrative – e-commerce hasn’t seen a step change and is almost exactly where a 10-year trend line would have predict it would be as a share of total retail in the US.
The reason for this is that total retail sales has grown strongly (+13% vs. normally being +2-3%). In absolute terms, shoppers spent $204bn on e-commerce in Q3 2021 but the pre-pandemic trend would have predicted $183bn.
Absolutely worth a look as it nicely covers macro and strategic trends from the tech industry.
This chart shows how software as a service (SaaS) has pushed up the amount of software companies can use (as there is no need to get IT to install/support/configure new applications).
The move to cloud delivery for software has miles to go (it is just 10-15% of enterprise IT spend and 20-30% of workloads).
COBOL is the programming language that underpins the entire financial system.
“Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background.“
“The second most valuable asset in the United States — after oil — is the 240 billion lines of COBOL”
The language is old (from the 1960s) and runs on huge machines (mainframes), yet it is extremely suited to the task of processing billions of transactions very fast.
“In conversations with POLITICO, more than a dozen industry and government officials involved with the work of Gaia-X said the project was struggling to get off the ground amid infighting between corporate members, disagreement over its overall aims and a bloated bureaucratic structure that is delaying decisions. One industry official closely involved in the work of Gaia-X called it a “mess.”“
“In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators.“
Substack just announced they have hit 1 million paid subscribers.
Provocative chart from latest Bain technology report.
“When the facts are reviewed, most big tech M&A spending actually benefits consumers and doesn’t hamper competition. That’s according to Bain’s analysis of all $300 million-plus acquisitions, totaling more than $150 billion, from 2005 to 2020 by the five US hyperscalers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft“
Overall they find that, excluding Linkedin, 72% of M&A spending created value for consumers, rising to 89% if we exclude Nokia/Motorola.
For those interested the methodology is in the appendix of the report.
