I’ll go with Salesforce (CRM).
1) The work from home revolution will drive productivity in the 20’s and 30’s like the personal computer did in the 90’s. Knowledge workers and customer service agents will accept far less pay in exchange for no commute and working from lower cost places. Thus, most of the reduction in meaningless waste due to commuting will accrue to employers who adopt cloud based systems. In 2040, no one will be driving an oil burner for an hour a day to get to and from a massively expensive office building to stare at a computer screen and attend meetings. That’s utterly backwards, even today.
2) The concept of each corporation having hoards of expensive IT workers to maintain its own servers and custom applications is utterly backward as well. The era when “Bob” in IT worked all morning to fix a bug that was causing downtime for 1000 people is over. Infinitely customizable cloud apps will lower the educational requirements for developers and eliminate the need for onsite hosting. Just like nobody writes websites from scratch in html anymore, nobody will be building business data processes from scratch anymore either. Salesforce also speeds the pace at which changes can be made, because less testing is required.
3) Revenues are growing in the 24% range per year. The last 10 years’ compound annual growth rate is 29%. The company has financially doubled since 2018. Even if we assume that growth will slow down over the years, any reasonable forecast does not intersect with the S&P500’s 6-7% revenue growth rate for a very long time. That’s a long time for CRM to outgrow the market and justify its 49 PE. Come to think of it, why am I paying a 45 PE for the S&P to grow revenues 7% when I could pay a 49 PE for Salesforce to grow it 24%?
4) Salesforce is device and platform independent, so we don’t have to guess about who wins the OS, processor, or form factor wars. If you think the devices of the future will be radically different than anything we know today, CRM might be a better tech bet than MSFT, AAPL, or Google.
5) CRM is also a pessimist’s dream stock. Amid the agonizing worries about inflation, overpriced stocks, vulnerable bonds, etc. let’s ask ourselves what S&P 500 sector fell the least and came out the strongest from the 2008 crisis? Tech did. It is both safer and faster growing. A crisis would only spread tech’s lead over the broader S&P, as has happened before. Because CRM sells labor savings and speed of change (as opposed to luxury, shopping, or entertainment tech purposes), it would be comparatively better positioned to weather an era of higher inflation and higher rates, if that comes to pass. As it is, they have been doing fine in the disinflationary environment of the last decade. CRM has almost twice as much cash on hand as it has total debt (yes I said total debt!) which is a rather odd contrarian position these days. Activists will probably unlock a lot of value from leveraging the company in the coming decades.