Hardware

It feels as though there's a cycle with waves of this kind of junk. Stuff that consumers really don't want but companies are so convinced are revolutionary they try to shove it everywhere

3D TV's were pushed, but not that hard. Cryptocurrency had a brief moment in the sun where it looked like it might be viable. There's smaller things like physical buttons being replaced by capacitive and eventually touch screens on everything from phones to appliances to cars (it seems Apple might be reversing that). There's been a huge push away from digital media, but 80% of PS5's sold have been the disc drive version and the markets for DVD's and Blu-Rays seems to be heating up despite stores saying they are going to stop carrying them. There's probably a lot more I can't remember.

Companies have been shifting away from meeting consumer demand and towards trying to shape consumer demand themselves instead. I blame the Marketing industry- with the rise of the Internet, TV, and even cheap printed materials over the past couple hundred years. It's so easy to make a new brand that there's no incentive to maintain a reputation anymore. Craftsman is a famous example.

The power has shifted to investors. Announcing AI integration makes the stock price go up. We saw the same thing with crypto a few years ago- the most famous example is probably the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changing it's name to Long Blockchain Corporation and getting a stock price boost without actually changing their operations or products at all.

We will buy what our oligarch overlords decide to sell us and we will be grateful to them for the privilege.

But companies like microsoft? Is their plan to keep plowing tens of billions of dollars into “AI” in hopes of eventually discovering/creating the “next IT revolution”?

Microsoft has roughly a market cap of 3.2 trillion dollar, so while tens of billions certainly isn't cheap, it also isn't going all in. I think one has to approach it from a betting perspective. Burning a few billion dollar is certainly not great, but also doesn't fundamentally hurt the company. Missing out on a major trend on the other hand is something even large companies can't afford. So it is at least as much about risk management as it is about returns.

Even Zuck eventually stopped burning billions on his metaverse fetish

He hasn't given up on it though, just maybe scaled back a bit. And honestly in theory i can see the appeal of what he is trying to do. Seems like he is trying to stay ahead and eventually become the default platform for ar/vr devices, similar to microsoft with windows and google with android. So while the costs are huge (and i still don't quite understand where all that money goes), the reward could be worth it in retrospective, if he succeeds.