A Software Insider's Point of ViewNews Analysis

New Chips, New Business Models Ahead In Accelerated Computing Nvidia stock is up 267% YoY. With over 10,000 people in physical attendance and up to 100,000 people virtually attending, this could be the largest AI conference. All eyes on the next wave for AI with CEO Jensen Huang ready to keynote at 1:00 pm PT at the SAP Center in San Jose. The key things to look for in the keynote:

The Leap Year Brings Announcement Of A New Copilot - Finance Microsoft announced the public preview of Copilot for Finance. With tools such as Copilot, the user experience begins and ends with generative AI. In conversations with Vice President of Business Applications Engineering - Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications Marketing - Emily He, Vice President of AI-led ERP Engineering - Georg Glantshnig, users can now apply geneative AI across departments such as sales, service, finance, and IT with Copilot for M365, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, Copilot for Finance, and Copilot Studio.

Sam Altman just faced his Steve Jobs moment when the OpenAI board fired him on Friday. The balance between too much governance and not enough innovation was the challenge OpenAI faced. This was a very immature board with members who had never built companies, never moved from ideology to commercialization, nor had any pragmatic board experience.

Three Factors Drive Growth In MATANA Stocks 1. AI Powers Valuation Growth, But Earnings Growth Keeps Momentum Going, 2. Ads Are Back For The Remaining Digital Giants, 3. Cloudy Times Ahead (For Now).

Temporary Slow Down Ahead All indications from Constellation's 1000 person executive network show a temporary 3 to 6 month slowdown ahead. This pause in general IT spending impacts mostly the North American markets.

The Q1 Tech Earnings Breathe Life Among The Digital Giants. With just Apple left to report in the tech earnings season, three major trends have emerged

Adobe Delivers Generative AI With Adobe Firefly At Adobe Summit on March 21, 2023, Adobe announced and delivered its generative AI offering known as Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly, is a collection of generative AI models built for creative applications. The offering joins the platform’s AI services. The first Firefly model will focus on image generation and text effects, trained on the hundreds of millions of Adobe stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe plans to integrate Firefly into their Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Express product lines.

Will there be a run on Silicon Valley Bank? The the run on Silicon Valley Bank is real. VCs have told founders to take their cash out. This could be more than a one day thing. SVB was forced to sell the assets to cover deposit withdrawals.

The $450 Billion Ad Tech Market Is About To Be Shaken Up By AI When Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it was the 21st search engine to enter the market. In 2022 Google generated over $200 billion in revenue off of search advertising and other digital advertising. MIcrosoft launched the Bing search engine in 2009, built from the assets of Live Search which was released in 2006. By all accounts, Microsoft Bing was the laggard among Google and Yahoo in the space. Round 1 of the search engine wars was one by Google which has dominate for almost two decades.

Big Tech and Market Reset Bring Optimism To Markets While many in the market are still psyching others into a recession, the fears are subsiding and the NASDAQ appears to be where the optimists are. Five factors have led to the mini rebound in this market of lowered expectations as watchers await the fed rate decision.:

This year's Amazon Web Services reInvent brought over 55,000 attendees to one of the premier tech industry events. The obvious and noticeable change in this year's event was an overemphasis on partnerships and alliances. The AWS leadership team made it clear that partners were more than welcomed.  IBM's presence as the Global Partner of the year did not go unnoticed by the attendees and of course the other public cloud vendors who have not yet had the courage to host in-person events at scale.

Microsoft Faces Its Biggest Challenge Despite Its "Social" Standing Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella’s and Vice Chair and President Brad Smith face their toughest challenge. There was always that belief that so long Microsoft acted like a“good citizen” on social issues they would be immune to anti-trust. That myth has been burst. The FTC has filed a lawsuit and a judge must decide if the case is strong enough to block the $69B deal. The FTC fears Microsoft will not provide titles for other platforms. Other headwinds include 16 countries that will have to approve the mega deal. China will probably block the deal to protect TenCent's position. Tencent also owns 5% of Activision.