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Tech needs a new ‘compelling product story’ or else: Analyst

Big tech companies need to produce compelling new products or see their stock prices go south, Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee said Monday.

The technology sector fell almost 3 percent last week with underwhelming earnings from Microsoft, Google and IBM. This week, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn release their earning reports.

"Technology is all about product cycles, and at the scale of the industry today, in order to really move the needle, you have to have something huge like smartphones," McNamee said on CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "But now that smartphones are mature, we're between major product cycles, and it's my view that this is going to be a year where in the absence of a compelling product story, stocks are going to [go down]."

Still, McNamee said Apple is relatively underpriced and is "uniquely customer-focused" with a lot of revenue.

T. Rowe Price portfolio manager Ken Allen told CNBC that big-cap tech is in a period of transition, and the cloud-based sector isn't moving fast enough to offset the decline of the PC.

"While it's not a new trend, the magnitude of how significant cloud computing will be for the tech industry is very large and I think that continues to provide opportunities looking forward," he said on "Squawk on the Street."

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He said Facebook and Google have lots of overlap, and better growth ahead.

"What will be interesting going forward is the overlap they'll have on video advertising, and that's really a focus we have in terms of who will likely have the upper hand there," he said. "But I think there's a lot of room for both to continue going strongly as they take share from others online and especially from offline, including television and newspaper, so both have good growth ahead."

Janus portfolio manager and analyst Denny Fish was generally optimistic, saying that we've seen worse tech earnings before.

In fact, he said, some lesser-known and cloud-based companies like ServiceNow are outperforming big tech firms like Microsoft. Investor expectations were too high for Microsoft and Google, resulting in the adverse stock reaction last week, he added.

"Investors are struggling with what the margin implications are for the business as it transitions," he said on CNBC's "Halftime Report."

Apple reports on Tuesday, Facebook does so Wednesday and Amazon and LinkedIn report on Thursday.

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