In all seriousness - haven't they, at some level - always done this? Even in the sense that VCs will take a stance such that "we only invest in mobile".

That's debatable - look at the late 90s early 2000's. They were playing catchup. Now, it appears they are setting the tone.

The funny part is those all seem like bad VC bets to me. Not sure of any 10 billion dollar companies come out of this areas in the next 5-7 years. I think the timeline is longer. IOT is a 1% product. Same with vr. ML requires massive data sets.