I'm still betting on 1970s Vertical Market Software - and not Meta Muse.

Reading this title in the age of AI, some will probably think I’m crazy. You’ll also think I’m crazy holding over half a million dollars between Constellation Software and Topicus while frontier labs, Metas, Amazons, and Googles of the world develop the next generation of agents to plan our vacations, order our lunch, and kill us all.

All the while, I’m sticking to the Berkshire Hathaway of software. Businesses built from the ground up between the 1970s and 1990s, long before the "press *enter*" engineering era.
Don’t get me wrong, the advancement of LLMs is impressive, to say the least. But my investment style comes down to a simple choice involving basic arithmetic and cautious assumptions about the future: What’s the product, what’s the profit, and how long will it last?

My view is that many, if not the majority, of investors in AI and AI-adjacent businesses are making hasty decisions about AI adoption rates while paying hefty multiples. The market is critically underestimating consumer learned behavior, operational workflows, habits, procedural muscle memory, and the sheer friction of technological adoption.

AI remains an unproven product class with unknown customer adoption, unknown retention, and shaky economics. It promises the world, squeezing investors into a hype train fueled by a cash-burning furnace that grows ever brighter. Everyone is chasing the pie, and the market has become entirely narrative-driven:

OpenAI and Anthropic show up -> Google and traditional software are dead.

DeepSeek pops up -> Time to dump all AI stocks.

Google releases Gemini -> Google wins, Meta loses.

Meta releases Muse -> Meta wins, everyone else loses.

It’s amusing to watch people on X and YouTube call winners and losers in the "agentic race" when we still have no idea how this product category will evolve, whether anyone will use the word agentic in 20 years, or if consumers will actually pay for it. It's also odd to me that the market goes wild over a launch like Muse within days of release, despite throwing away billions of free tokens and being a money incinerator with no clear path to monetization.

Gary Marcus recently brought attention back to Facebook M, an AI assistant developed in 2015 that touted the exact same use cases as Muse today: automated shopping, bookings, and ticket reservations. It flopped and was scrapped by 2018. Yes, compute and model architectures are vastly superior now, but the underlying lesson stands: automated task delegation failed to catch on. The market is now making the exact same bet, several orders of magnitude larger.

Personally, I still don’t see why someone would book a trip through an intermediary chatbot rather than opening Booking.com or Uber directly. Why prompt a bot for groceries when you can just tap through Walmart.com?

A massive, untested assumption is being made that consumer habits will shift overnight.

All this to say, AI is a large bet on the unknown.

I prefer betting on proven products that have been in service for two or three decades, maintaining 97% to 98% customer retention, predictable cash flows, and immediate profitability. If you think Meta's Muse is impressive, check out HomeCare HomeBase. It isn't owned by Constellation Software, but it is the epitome of what they buy. Coded in 1999 and still processing roughly 334,000 daily home health visits across the U.S., this software has been in active service for 27 years. The UI barely looks different from its BlackBerry days, yet customers stay. Embedded, entrenched, and mission-critical. It sits by the thousands in back offices and on clinician handhelds, backed by twenty years of muscle memory. That is vertical market software. It works, it’s predictable, customers stay, and above all, customers pay. Constellation Software owns over a thousand equivalents to HomeCare HomeBase. I’ll take that over Meta Muse.