edwardrooster

A LONG ROAD ahead for Snapchat's Visual OS ambitions

NYSE:SNAP   Snap Inc.
This company, whose leadership has dubbed it a "Camera Company" is an experiment in platform making. Prepare for a long haul - it won't be easy. If they make this work, if it survives and matures as a business, then you have a platform for the 2020s/30s.

I think the near-term metrics and economics are FUGLY as all but I think this as a speculation is in whether a visual OS can be designed and deployed.

Right now all the "fellow kids" are talking with each other this platform. Will the demographic swarm move on to new toys which ride up the utility curve and become work and life tools? Maybe. Or will this both ride up the utility curve and mature into a fully functional service?

We're fully a generation plus into the browser era when Javascript was banged out in 10 days (tied nominally to Java for recognition) for Netscape and a monochrome landscape was given color and detail for artisans as intended by Marc Andreessen.

Will we see an experiment in moving a 2 dimensional experience into a fully articulated 3 dimensional virtual and augmented world building?

Will the landscape change again?

The company's June announcements hint at management's intentions: World Building.

I think an instructive and cautionary way to look at any snap chart or story is to look at Amazon's long 20+ year journey. I love those insane statements of "10,000 invested at this date would be worth... XXX dollars today..." easy to say in retrospect but it was decades of doubt and pain along the way if you paid too much attention from day to day.

Perhaps it takes a time frame that long and patience which attention-challenged audiences will need to embrace a controlled risk experiment in investing.

SHORT TERM watch out, lots of BACKING and filling from that gap up during it's recent blast off from single digits (2nd time since late 2019 when it was trading for a 4 handle and change!)

I will not trade it as a trend follower but I will accumulate it and see what happens in 18+ months and if they screw it up, hold it again for another 18months.

It's going to be a long painful road ahead.

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