Tech's Big 5 -- Here to Stay? (nytimes.com) 250
schwit1 tips a piece at the NY Times about the most entrenched companies in consumer technology: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The article makes the case that these five have a such a strong grip on the modern tech industry that they're destined to stick around for the foreseeable future. From the article:
Tech people like to picture their industry as a roiling sea of disruption, in which every winner is vulnerable to surprise attack from some novel, as-yet-unimagined foe. ... But for much of the last half-decade, most of these five giants have enjoyed a remarkable reprieve from the boogeymen in the garage. And you can bet on them continuing to win. So I’m coining them the Frightful Five. .... Though competition between the five remains fierce — and each year, a few of them seem up and a few down — it’s becoming harder to picture how any one of them, let alone two or three, may cede their growing clout in every aspect of American business and society. ... In various small and large ways, the Frightful Five are pushing into the news and entertainment industries; they’re making waves in health care and finance; they’re building cars, drones, robots and immersive virtual-reality worlds. Why do all this? Because their platforms — the users, the data, and all the money they generate — make these far-flung realms seem within their grasp."
Buy disruption (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the age old pattern used by established monopolies or oligopolies. See the purchase of Lyft, investment in Uber, the purchase of Foxpro, how the oil and gas industry purchases wildcat operators as just a few examples. If you have a large amount of cash and are too large to innovate, buy the innovation before someone else does and threatens your business.
Nerver try to predict the future (Score:5, Insightful)
20 years ago, only two of those five companies even existed. And if you had asked the prognosticators back then who would still be on top 20 years later, you would have gotten a very different list.
Re:Nerver try to predict the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. TFS even says, "But for much of the last half-decade, most of these five giants have enjoyed a remarkable reprieve from the boogeymen in the garage." Half decade. 5 years. So the entire point is that because something has stayed somewhat stable for 5 years that's probably going to continue into the foreseeable future. In the tech industry, no less...
TFA is horribly near sighted.
Re:Nerver try to predict the future (Score:5, Interesting)
No, because in part patent consolidation means the boogeymen in the garage have no hope in hell.
Come up with new and disruptive technologies? We'll buy you out as soon as you're on the radar.
Won't sell because you have visions of being the next big thing? We'll ensure our lawyers make it so you'll never see the light of day.
The tech industry has fundamentally changed. There IS no way a startup could do something which isn't covered under patents and other agreements between the big companies who have all mutually agreed to licensing deals.
Time was people started companies because they had a cool idea for a product, and wanted to start companies.
These days it's give the illusion of a cool product long enough to cash out and run like hell.
It's stable because it's becoming increasingly impossible to get into the game.
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No, but it could be vaguely threatened as being in violation of a bunch of patents Microsoft refused to name, thereby insinuating that it might not be safe to use.
There were a bunch of years they did that.
Oh, and there's that whole secure boot/UEFI thingy in which they can try to deny you access to the hardware.
Re:Nerver try to predict the future (Score:4, Insightful)
This all depends on what their actual prediction is, which I don't think is very clear even after reading the article. All it really says is they will remain major players in the industry for the foreseeable future. It is so broad, unspecific (and useless) that it will almost certainly come to pass.
Very few companies of their size just go away. At worst one of them could be bought out by a rival, but I doubt their brand name would ever be discarded. If the prediction was that all 5 of these companies would be among the 10 most influential tech companies 20 years from now, that would be the kind of silly prediction you are referring to. But will some people still be employed by all five of these companies in 20 years? That prediction will probably pan out.
Definition (Score:2)
All it really says is they will remain major players in the industry for the foreseeable future
So a month then?
I might agree but even a month is pretty hazy in tech.
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Yeah, 20 years ago, Microsoft is the only one of those that would have made such a list. AOL, IBM, Yahoo, and Netscape probably would have rounded out a 'top 5' list in that timeline,
10 Years ago, Google is the only one I'd unambiguously considered to have joined the list. . If I had to make a top 5 list for that time frame, Microsoft, Google, Myspace would be firmly in it. Amazon as a retailer was of course a slam dunk, but less so as a 'tech' company, so I'm not sure. Apple is tricky, since as a mus
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but the real overwhelming Apple presence happened with the iPhone.
And even then, it's not hard to imagine Android overtaking them and Apple mostly losing the market.
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It's not hard to imagine any of those companies fates changing dramatically. It's just that most people won't believe such scenarios plausible. That's the point of my skepticism, the article proclaims them as the unstoppable entrenched 5, but history has shown a lot of unstoppable entrenched companies getting surprisingly upended, at least in the tech field, where the barrier to entry isn't as high as most people believe. It takes surprisingly little for a competitor to start seeing runaway success and v
Re:Nerver try to predict the future (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, we can write up a plausible scenario to any of them. AWS, google compute engine, and azure are one catastrophic hypervisor compromise from a mass loss of confidence. Apple and Facebook are one fad away from being rendered history (regardless of the technical strength of their offerings, consumers are really fickle). Like you say, a sudden loss of confidence in internet advertising would crush Google's main stream. Also any company is generally a couple of board members away from being driven into t
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Yeah, 20 years ago, Microsoft is the only one of those that would have made such a list. AOL, IBM, Yahoo, and Netscape probably would have rounded out a 'top 5' list in that timeline[...]
Wow, I feel old. I remember when Ashton-Tate (dBase), Satellite Software (WordPerfect), and Lotus Corporation (Lotus 1-2-3) were unassailable.
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Yes, the mid 80s.... It would be sort of amusing to see this same article written about the 'tech' industry written assuming the perspective of the middle of each decade for the last 50 years. It's really amazing how at any give time people feel like 'ok, *now* things are settled and here are the players and the components are known'.
Probably a good rule of thumb is if someone feels like it's interesting enough to actually write an article about, it's probably not settled. Only when pretty much *everyon
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In that timeframe (10 years ago), Amazon didn't offer an 'platform' for tech. The subject matter is tech companies entrenched by owning a platform. They may have had a lot of tech internally (clearly they did to enable creation of the platform), but they had not yet moved to build a business out of that. If you said 5 years ago, that's different, but 10 years ago they had not even announced anything EC2 like yet.
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But that's the whole point, things have rapidly changed and the article feels like this rapid change has led these companies to unstoppable status. History shows that a *lot* of companies have risen, seem stable long enough for people to pronounce them the unambiguous victor for eternity, just to turn around and crash and burn.
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Right?! There's a very "end of history" vibe in this piece. Remember when we almost had all of physics understood in 1910? Remember when desktop computing finally got good in 2005? Remember when the perfect sailing ship came out in 1840?
Writing a piece that essentially says "ah, the future is finally clear to me" is a sure-fire way to get a humbling dose of revolutionary disruption.
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Well, the reality is it's a short term way to sound like you know something you don't, with no real long term consequences. In 10 years think anybody is going to lose sleep over how wrong he was? Or even remember?
I long ago decided that when I hear pundits, prognosticators, and futurists telling me what the future will hold that they're mostly full of shit.
They generally fall into the category of people who have something to gain by that particular prediction coming true ... or people making predictions b
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I especially object to the term, "foreseeable future". What does that even mean? 20 years? 5? Maybe six months?
I remember when IBM and Sun were the tech companies that were going to be on top for the foreseeable future.
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âoeHere to stayâ (Score:2)
Not Facebook (Score:2)
So far Facebook, which has only been going for 12 years (yes, I know that for all the NOOBS, that seems like forever - and considering their age, it probably is) and has no history of changing itself to adapt to radically different challenges. It might be able to, but until it has gone through a coup
Stupid article is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo will be king of search engines forevah!
AOL is indestructible!
Prodigy? Silicon Graphics? Sun?
Naaah, naah... These "frightful five" companies will be with us "forevah!"
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Don't forget AT&T and IBM.
How can you have a Frightful Five without them?
And IBM will be with us until cockroaches rule the Earth.
DEC, Compaq, Sun, Wang, Delphi, CompuServe (Score:2)
The tech world is littered with companies that dominated then died.
Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry.
Yahoo sucks, long live Altavista (Score:2)
And get off my lawn.
Automotive's Big 5 (Score:3)
Are some of America's best car companies-Studebacker, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Packard-here to stay?
You can never predict what will be around a year or 2 from now, much less over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
Also, Car Analogy!
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Dude, Tucker automotive is gonna take them down!
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I would note that Oldsmobile and Pontiac were GM nameplates--the names may be gone, but GM's still here.
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Oldsmobile was picked up by GM in 1909 (which was the year GM was founded--GM started out with only Buick and Oldsmobile was their first major acquisition.) Pontiac was always a GM nameplate--GM brought out the first Pontiac in 1926. I think you're a little dismissive of Studebaker; while it's true their sales figures didn't match the Big Three, they did all right until the 1950s.
Amazon I think may fall down a bit... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have friends who work and who have worked there.... the job climate is basically ridiculous. Lots of hours, the pay not as great as their neighbor in Seattle (Microsoft), the advancement not very good either. Not to mention, Amazon is basically falling down in the enterprise space. They have made a lot of gains with CIOs/CTOs who are infrastructure focused and have a mission to "cut costs," so they have companies like GE and the like moving over to use their IaaS, but their platform services are a joke.
Everything at AWS is rehashed open source that is made to fit into a 'cloud' world... nothing wrong with this of course, but most of the basis of their products never really was meant for humungously distributed systems. Microsoft on the other hand (love them or hate them), made a totally new stack for cloud and the development community is embracing it on the enterprise side. This is Amazon's game to lose, but given the way their storage is segregated, their platform is one-way (come to us, no migration path anywhere else!), and their costs are nothing to write home about (because everybody price matches the IaaS pricing now).... I dunno, it's not going to be great for them going into the future. Of course I could be wrong, but right now I think given their human resource problems, their platform issues, and their inability to focus on developers (since they cater more to the ITPro crowd with IaaS solutions), it doesn't look good long term for them.
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Microsoft on the other hand (love them or hate them), made a totally new stack for cloud and the development community is embracing it on the enterprise side.
Having used them, I would say that have a lot of downtime. And their APIs are obscure...
Also their storage services don't scale beyond 500TB and some fixed amount of bandwidth and request rate.
But yes, up and coming IaaS companies like packet.net is making very interesting offers. Price/performance wise, and if these companies eventually do services like S3, SQS and dynamodb they will be in a really good position.
Unfortunately, I don't really see any open source dynamodb-like solution... Guaranteed req
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Dunno, I've been a happy AWS user for years. Compared to everything out there they're the cheapest, best performing, most transparent, and easiest to use. I say that as someone who's getting abused by softlayer on a daily basis.
Re:Amazon I think may fall down a bit... (Score:4, Informative)
I guess you're modded up because you sound interesting, but really? I'm not trying to be insulting but do you know what you are talking about?
This article [informationweek.com] is a little old but AWS really is that far ahead of everyone else.
Plus, in terms of services and features, AWS [computerworlduk.com] is also ahead.
Now where Azure has benefit is if you're an MS shop and you want to just outsource your entire backoffice. But if you're developing....AWS has a lot more features than Azure, if you know what you're doing. No, you can't throw together a .NET wizard-based project, but if you're using an open source stack, or more of a LAMP-like MVC environment (python, rubyonrails, etc) then AWS throws so many tools for you to use (RDS, Dynamo, S3, etc) then its hard to see how you DON'T think AWS is a good environment for developers.
And what do you mean by "Platform Issues"?
And actually, all the enterprise developers I've worked with are looking more at AWS than Azure (not that I'm some sort of worldwide development expert or anything).
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To be honest...CloudFormation. Being able to define the entire environment in code(ish), and letting the environment self-manage and self-heal. We don't have sysads who sit at the console and manually configure things, launching servers and whatnot. In fact, in the prod VPC no on logs in to any servers. If there's a new redhat patch or something, the base image gets updated and the instances in the production environment automatically replace themselves.
Check out the Netflix Tech Blog [netflix.com] for some ideas on
Everything that can be invented HAS been invented! (Score:4, Funny)
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Of the five (Score:3)
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If Microsoft were as entrenched as the article implies, then they would not need to employ such despicably deceitful tactics in order to get Windows 7 customers to upgrade to Windows 10.
Microsoft is showing their desperation as they try to remain relevant.
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Totally wrong. Microsoft might fall in relevance some, but there is NOTHING to replace it in a corporate world.
Facebook has to be the most likely to fall the fastest, and Amazon the most likely to become something other than it is.
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I was reading Joel on Software in the netty, and one of the chapters was about how 19 of the top 20 tech companies had been replaced x years later.
The only one that hadn't was Microsoft, and his reason was they hadn't made a colossal fuckup like all the others. He made a joke about clippy.
Windows 10 is 27 legions of clippy.
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Possibly. The way I see it, MS used to have 90%+ of share of a much smaller market than what exists today. If they end up with, say, 20% of paying customers for Mobile/PC+Gaming, it will be more than enough for them to be bigger and more profitable than they've been so far.
Amazon seems to be comfortably building vertical integration in their role as the biggest retail (and logistics) operation in the world, so I'd expect them to stick around in the top 5 for a long time until China comes up with the biggest
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That's why they're so desperate to get everyone on Win 10 because they think it'll help them gain marketshare on mobile, not because they're any smaller than they've been on the desktop.
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Microsoft is a lot more than just Windows. Both MS and Google seem well diversified. I think MS has at least five different divisions that bring in over a billion dollars. They've done a good job of spreading out their investments so all their eggs aren't in one basket the way Apple has done with iPhone. PC sales are slowing but the notion that they would be replaced by tablets and phones just isn't coming true. People still need to get things done so the PC is here to stay and Windows10 is the most success
Modern Companies are Private Clubs (Score:2)
Modern corporations are really just clubs now. It used to be that an industrial mega-corp owned a huge quantity of capital equipment or physical resources, and this was what allowed them to keep out other competitors. If technology or tastes shifted, this capital equipment could quickly become a liability which would lead to their downfall.
However a tech company is really just a logo that attracts smart people and money from capital markets. Apple's products are not produced because they own the iPhone plan
Too Big To Fail (Score:2)
Seems everyone has forgotten about the legal defense we call "Too Big To Fail".
Cash reserves or popularity no longer matter as long as someone is still around to convince the government that the corporation qualifies for a taxpayer bailout.
A new and rather disgusting concept to continue perpetuating, but that's the problem with establishing precedent, and every one of the "Top 5" would attempt to use that defense if it ever came to that. And likely succeed.
Failure is no longer an option for monopolies as l
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Cash reserves or popularity no longer matter as long as someone is still around to convince the government that the corporation qualifies for a taxpayer bailout.
To do that you need to have a massive case for it. Apple can't exactly claim 100000 manufacturing losses + 1000000 through knockon effects like the car companies. Google or Facebook can't exactly claim that our system of money will implode if they suddenly ceased existing.
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Cash reserves or popularity no longer matter as long as someone is still around to convince the government that the corporation qualifies for a taxpayer bailout.
To do that you need to have a massive case for it. Apple can't exactly claim 100000 manufacturing losses + 1000000 through knockon effects like the car companies. Google or Facebook can't exactly claim that our system of money will implode if they suddenly ceased existing.
Yeah, you're right. It's probably a little too early to make those kinds of arguments.
I guess the best thing to do right now is to ignore any checks and balances (anti-monopoly laws) to ensure these companies become Too Big To Fail.
And since they have enough cash reserves to buy entire car companies, it's only a matter of ti...wait what? Google has self-driving cars now? Apple has their own car? Oh, nevermind, it's already started.
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None of those companies are "too big to fail".
Opinions on their status are irrelevant when no government will stop them from achieving that status.
Unless there's an Advertising Crash... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google and Facebook make almost all of their money from advertising/consumer tracking related activities. Both would be very different companies of they had to rely on direct revenue sources.
Facebook could shift to a subscription model and probably do fine - I'm guessing at least 100M or so people will pay $5-10 a month to keep sharing photos with friends and family - FB works well to keep people connected. If they can't run their infrastructure and development on $500M-$1B a month, they already have bigger issues that will bring them down.
Google will have a harder time. They have nothing of value that could fund their operations beyond the ad/tracking services. A crash in the ad market would probably be the end for Google.
Amazon is probably fine for a long time. The web needs a storefront, Amazon provides it.
Apple can crash by ignoring user's needs. As a hardware company with a ton of money in the bank, it will take a while. But, Apple could lose market share quickly if another consumer computing trend emerges that cuts into their hardware business. See Blackberry for a recent example.
MS is too entrenched in the business/consumer world to go anywhere. Just like Oracle won't go anywhere for a long time.
Just my quick thoughts on the topic...
-Chris
Re:Unless there's an Advertising Crash... (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree here. There are so many things that can go wrong with the advertising model.
First and foremost, people are slowly developing a resistance to advertisements. Ads have gotten vastly more intrusive and hostile, on all dimensions (meaning you're likely to see an advertisement that wiggles [hostile by exploiting the neurons that detect movement, instead of offering a compelling sell], you're likely to see an advertisement that tries to make you feel bad [a mainstay of advertising is pretending you have a defect and convincing you they have a fix, we are seeing more extreme stuff on the psychological axis], you're likely to see an advertisement where there didn't used to be one [novelty from climbing on the "ubiquitous hostile noise" axis] ), but this can only really ramp so far. The attitude of "I'm not affected by ads" is false, but the AMOUNT that you are affected by ads is absolutely shrinking. There's a concern that advertising clients will in some cases realize this and, if enough do at the same time, crash the industry.
Remember, it is MUCH MORE LIKELY for advertising to crash suddenly than decrease in ANY OTHER WAY. Regardless of your view on whether ads will be profitable in the future or not, in the CASE where they are less profitable, the industry itself will be able to mask this for much longer than any other industry (because their job is literally making you believe shit). So if it DOES go down, traditional predictors may not apply until it is way too late.
Second, people are becoming hostile to advertisements in unusual numbers, and making efforts to avoid them. Every Netflix user is explicitly dodging ads with his wallet and time. If Netflix were to put ads in shit, they'd be in serious trouble, and they know it. Every Netflix tells content providers that they have other ways to make money, and reminds people that they don't have to spend their whole life being attacked by jackanapes. Adblocking will win the technical fight, and while users of adblock software (I recommend ublock origin, and I think we know what apk host engine guy recommends!) are small in number, it is becoming MUCH easier to help non-technical people use these products, and they are becoming more popular. Every person who watches ad-free shows and views the ad-free web is someone who is much less likely to want to see ads in the future.
It all sums to advertisers having to jump through higher and higher hoops for lower and lower returns. If you throw ANYTHING to jostle the house of cards- an economic downturn, a religion recruiting heavily, any of the many political orientations that are ad-hostile gaining adherents, a series of studies that show a shitty ROI on ads- you could see a massive crash.
And here's all these tech giants that are really just about ads ads ads ads ads. It's not a very diverse position at all.
Facebook? GTFO. (Score:2)
Not necessarily (Score:2)
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At one time a list would have included IBM and DEC . IBM totally dominated the computer market, and DEC had a solid share of the minicomputer and technical market. The fact that they are not in the list now illustrates that any of the above 5 could become an "also ran", or even be bought out.
Correct. And more to the point, IBM and DEC ran their shows for decades. There is nothing to prevent the currently existing big 5 to do the same. Anything can happen, but with all seriousness, I can give these companies (specifically Amazon) at least another decade. And in the software industry, a decade is an eternity.
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Larry doesn't like being left out (Score:2)
The Big Five (Score:2)
AOL
Prodigy
CompuServe
GEnie
Delphi
***
Which of these five is still alive? Okay, AOL as some weird f'd up zombie exoskeleton.
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LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
The thought that this is it.. that this is all that technology will ever do for us is such a bleak view. That would mean our very societies will not change which is totally incorrect.
wut? (Score:2)
I must say if Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft were all to dissapear, it will change nothing. But Google as a search engine is still top notch and have no real competition so for the moment, they stay.
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I must say if Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft were all to dissapear, it will change nothing. But Google as a search engine is still top notch and have no real competition so for the moment, they stay.
From your world. The rest of the world uses Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft products. Could they be replaced? Yes but because they are not important to your world does not mean they are not important to everyone.
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No. America uses those. I'm Canadian and I find Amazon is great for reviews, and so-so on pricing. Their prime offering is a hilarious joke that needs to die ($80 and all I get is 'free' shipping on a very few items? LOL!)
Really so when I travel to Asia and see people using iPhones, that is all my imagination? When I am in Europe and see people using Windows, I must have had hallucinations? You seem to have a very binary way of thinking about who uses what. In Asia, they do use iPhones. They also use Galaxy phones too. It's not binary.
Microsoft could cease to exist and I wouldn't care.
Yes, you don't care. Companies that use Microsoft products do care.
Apple could cease to exist and nobody here would care. I know one person with an iPhone. They've dumped it for Android.
You, you, you, and your world. That does not reflect the actual world.
For 2015 alone, Apple sold more than 231 million iP [statista.com]
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I think they're right (Score:2)
The answer is no, of course (Score:2)
Which of these companies are the most likely to disappear:
Amazon
Apple
Facebook
Google
Microsoft
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Which of these companies are the most likely to disappear:
Facebook, Apple and Google; in that order. These companies are the ones who depend most on the preferences and tastes of fickle consumers. They (especially Facebook) have little to no value in the delivery of business services where longevity and stability reigns.
Key words "stick around for the foreseeable future (Score:2)
Lotus? AOL? Compuserve? MySpace? Yahoo!? (Score:2)
Lotus
AOL
MySpace
Yahoo!
These are just some of the companies that were once considered "dominant" in their various spaces, and then got utterly decimated by the passage of time.
While there may eventually be companies with the endurance and dominance of IBM or General Electric in the Internet space, it is hubris to say it is any of today's current companies. Their future is unwritten, and the mighty have fallen over and over again throughout history.
Components of the DJIA (Score:2)
It is interesting to consider the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Index [wsj.com] over time.
Some have stayed around forever (General Electric, since DJIA started in 1896). Some you may have never heard of (International Nickel, 1927-1959).
The majority of current DJIA components have only been in the index since 1991.
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A social media site can vanish as fast as it arrived if the Next New Thing comes along - look at MySpace - so as you say, Facebook could well be gone in 10 years. Not sure about MS, their intrenchment in the business IT world is so vast that it'll take a lot longer than 10 years for them to die even if they made a bigger stuff up than Windows 8 once more. Apple? No chance, not while it keeps selling the New Shiny and with cash reserves larger than some 2nd world countries.
Re:Facebook is already declining (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, there's still no reason to assume that any given tech or Internet services company will always be around. Go back a few years and AOL and Yahoo were juggernauts. Go back before that and IBM was hot.
Companies live and die by the research and development or the design they do that turns into products. Cut off the R&D, eventually the company withers on the vine. Apple has experienced it when Jobs wasn't at the helm, and other tech companies have folded because they myopically assumed that whatever thing they'd done to make their name would continue to bring in revenue. Look at how long Palm hung-on to PalmOS. Palm could have been what the iPhone and the Android platform have become if they'd not stunted themselves. Granted, their various corporate masters over the years didn't help, but the end result is that they're gone despite having been quite innovative when their products debuted.
Re:Facebook is already declining (Score:5, Informative)
Lousy time to run out of mod points... this was damned good.
I would add though that it's never one factor that makes a company grow, die, or stay steady-state. R&D is one of the most important, but believe it or not, so is marketing, product design, and the state of competition.
We can continue using Palm as an example... the combination of stuff that killed it? Well...
1) As you said, R&D was stifled and stymied, even by its own management.
2) The larger market moved, and gained speed as it did. PDAs were being eclipsed for the same reason pagers were; phones began gaining features that obviated both of them (SMS killed the pager, while Blackberry slowly killed off the PDA. the iPhone was simply the coup d' gras.) To Palm's credit, PalmOS was one of the most-licensed OSes in the North American smartphone market pre-iPhone, but they failed to capitalize on it early/fast enough.
3) competition kept multiplying with no reprieve, with new competitors arriving that were backed by much larger corporations: BlackBerryOS, WinCE/WinMobile, Symbian, iOS, Android, etc etc etc. PalmOS
4) management dithered way too much, and leadership became rather dysfunctional and inward-looking (according to folks who worked there, anyway)
5) investments were grossly misspent, leaving Palm cash-poor at critical junctures.
6) Marketing was AWOL... the Palm brand was incredibly stale by the time smartphones became a thing outside of CxOs and salesmen. While PalmOS did very, very well in North America, its market share was barely above statistical noise in Europe and Asia.
There are a lot of other, smaller factors, but the idea stands - it's more than one thing that determines the fate of a company and its technology, eh? :)
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Go back a few years and AOL and Yahoo were juggernauts. Go back before that and IBM was hot.
Sure, but... nobody wanted any of those. They were just tolerated until the real thing came along.
The migration was swift when the real thing appeared.
People seem to want Facebook. It will be very difficult to overturn that (Microsoft and Google have both failed and I'm sure Facebook can copy/buy anything that looks like a threat).
Predicting the failure of Facebook (Score:2)
Re:Facebook is already declining (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is 'pivoting'. They've taken over as the defacto 'forum' software for a large demographic. There are a lot of private invite only groups that people are on. It was just last year that they rolled out half assed threaded discussion. You can reply up to 1 level deep.
My wife was invited to one for her profession that's ~5000 MDs and she loves it. She's buried into it like I used to be to Slashdot. They have pretty good discussion and discourse despite Facebook's shitty "discussion" system.
Every time I try to move one of my groups to a forum or even Reddit it's a constant "But I'm already signed in with Facebook". If there was any way to describe how Facebook has embedded itself the online space it's like a cancer. It'll take years to cut out all the 'share on facebook' links and tracking hooks.
I would kill for a Facebook 2004 to come out. As a social network Facebook is absolutely terrible. As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad.
Re:Facebook is already declining (Score:4, Insightful)
As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad
I think this is where you hit it on the head, at least from a business perspective. Now I know there's a lot of Facebook haters ("You'll never catch ME on there!"). And hey, good for you. Seriously. But the bald truth right now is that facebook has like a billion users, so if you're in any sort of consumer-facing sector, if you're not leveraging Facebook in some way you're really missing the boat.
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MySpace was never anywhere as big as Facebook is today, so Facebook's decline will be quite a longer process. (Still possible within 10 years though.)
Microsoft isn't likely to make the same "stuff up" as Windows 8 in the next 10 years, because Windows 8 was the first step in a move toward faster and lighter upgrades, modern designs, and modern application models and APIs. Windows 10 2026 may look different from Windows 10 2016 but the journey there will be 20 small hills instead of 4 large mountains. I t
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You can't be sure about turning it around - there's no "too big to fail" in the industry. The risk Microsoft runs right now is to swing from one ditch to another. If changes goes too fast then customers won't keep up and if you alienate the IT professionals then you can end up losing corporate support. Especially if there's a breach in their "Office 365" online service solution which is now popular among a large volume of mid-size corporations.
Re: Facebook is already declining (Score:2)
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And the only reason IBM is alive today is that they have the banks and large corporations in their hands through their Cobol systems. Those systems are expensive as heck to run and when the large corporations and banks starts to realize that they are overcharged then they will migrate to other solutions.
Banks are probably going to be the last hold-out for IBM Cobol systems because few people, if anybody, understand the whole system that the banks uses today.
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Perhaps if you actually thought about what you were saying you wouldn't contradict yourself so much?
I suspect that if it was feasible and cost-effective to migrate they'd have done it 17 years ago.
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IBM may not be doing great but don't fool yourself, IBM is still bigger than Amazon and they're much more embedded in the infrastructure that allows entities like Google, Facebook and Amazon to exist. They're far from going anywhere anytime soon.
IBM may not be doing great but don't fool yourself, IBM is still bigger than Amazon and they're much more embedded in the infrastructure that allows entities like Google, Facebook and Amazon to exist. They're far from going anywhere anytime soon.
So they think.
IBM got to be so big, not because it was a mainframe company - there were half-a-dozen mainframe companies at one time. They got to be so big because they were a service company. Any incompetent idiot was assured a well-paid career as a "DP" manager (IT wasn't yet the term) simply by doing exactly what the IBM salesmen told him to do.
They threw that all away when they offshored most of the support jobs and gutted the domestic teams. Even back circa 1994 I could get better support for Linux (wi
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All the while, Google and Microsoft are STILL trying to play catch up to AWS innovations.
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You were in too much of a hurry, the article is up now. Just half an hour after you posted.
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I am absolutely certain that Chinese companies will not be able to pierce the top-end design area for probably at least two decades. The Chinese are famous for imitation and cheap knock offs, but are obviously capable of top end anything- the problem seems to be that almost no Chinese products has NEW DESIGN. It's like their engineers can't their pointy haired bosses to invest in design as a concept. They copy an existing design, or they have some flat brutalist approach.
Samsung? Yea, Samsung could comp
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