In his piece in Business Insider, Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, called for an end to the debate over whether we were in a tech bubble. “I believe that this is shortsighted and rooted in the belief that at some point the tech industry must undergo the same unfortunate ‘burst’ as in 2000,” Immelt wrote. “This line of thinking ignores the immense value that digital technologies have already created in the consumer world…more importantly, it neglects the value digital technologies will create in the industrial world over the next decade.”
With a billion-dollar investment in Predix, the cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet, GE is quickly transforming into the world’s largest digital industrial company. Immelt said the bubble “line of thinking” failed to see the “the value digital technologies will create in the industrial world over the next decade – an estimated $8.6 trillion in productivity gains, more than two times the future value of the consumer Internet market.”
The story was also picked up by CNBC. Immelt will be talking about GE’s digital transformation during the Annual Outlook Investor Meeting held in New York on Dec. 16. Sign up for GE’s investor newsletter for more information.