Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 10 Years?
An anonymous reader writes: It's interesting to look back a decade and see how the tech industry has changed. The mobile phone giants of 10 years ago have all struggled to compete with the smartphone newcomers. Meanwhile, the game console landscape is almost exactly the same. I'm sure few of us predicted Apple's rebirth over the past decade, and many of us thought Microsoft would have fallen a lot further by now. With that in mind, let's make some predictions. What companies aren't going to make it another 10 years? Are Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking behemoths going to fade as quickly as they arose? What about the heralds of the so-called 'sharing economy,' like Uber? Are IBM and Oracle going to hang on? Along the same lines, what companies do you think will definitely stick around for another decade or more? Post your predictions for all to see. I'll buy you a beer in 10 years if you're right.
Redhat, if they continue with this systemd shenanigans.
Having said that, in ten years they'll have probably got most of the bugs out of it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
what if /. is not around in 10 years... how would you do?
... as soon as the first colored iMac was released, and everyone started building USB devices in colorful plastic cases.
Sounds like Dice is worried about something.
It takes a long time for a big company to die and many can reinvent themselves. Look at the origins of Nokia and Nintendo - neither was exactly a tech company when they started. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are big enough to survive ten year of terrible decisions by management (Microsoft already has!) without much pain. The companies that tend to die are ones where some disruptive technology changes their market completely and they don't adapt. SGI was a good example: some of their engineers proposed building a cheaper graphics accelerator for the mass market and they decided not to build them because they'd cannibalise the graphics workstation market. Those engineers left and formed nVidia, and now a graphics workstation is just a commodity PC with a high-end nVidia card in it. SGI had the opportunity to lead a shift in the market and decided not to take it. Those are hard to predict, because they typically rely on advances in manufacturing that suddenly make something economically viable that wasn't previously. Often these things are gradual (in the nVidia/SGI case, the reduction in fabrication costs until it became feasible to make a mass-market GPU) and aren't obvious until a watershed has passed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
IBM management have turned the company into a financial engineering behemoth, buying their own shares at low interest rates to prop up share prices so management get bonuses, sacking engineering staff, lowering customer service. They're history.
Two tech companies clinging to their 20th century brands.
Yahoo will be bought out for a fraction of their current value for their "IP". HP will probably get taken over by a Chinese corp like Lenovo.
IBM's balance sheet isn't looking good, it's debt is spiraling out of control.
Ten years can be a long time if you've got the cash and a "core business" to eek out existence on. As long as there is a need for new mainframes for the banking industry, IBM will be around. I think they're going to shrink a lot, though.
Oracle isn't going anywhere. They're too entrenched.
Apple's market will shrink rather than grow, primarily due to their failure to really innovate. Let's face it, they've been tweaking and fiddling for over five years now rather than coming out with anything new or earth shattering. But they've got the cash to buy an entire nation (or two), so they'll still be around.
The same goes for Microsoft. They've got sufficient cash and resources to hang on for a long time, even if their core markets are shrinking. Let's face it -- basic business functionality will always be needed, even if it isn't glamourous and exciting. They'll continue to lose market share to tablets and smell phones in the consumer markets, and will re-focus on their core business of serving business customers.
Uber, Lyft, and the like are going to encounter some rude shocks from the courts in the near future, and their business models will be declared illegal. It's already happening in a lot of districts.
Google Plus will finally get the axe in 2-3 years, but Google itself will continue along it's merry way.
Twitter will shrink dramatically or disappear entirely as the video capabilities of higher bandwidth and newer/denser technologies make written dialogue even more irrelevant than it is today.
Facebook will still be around, and bigger than ever. They've made a couple of smart investments, and if those play out, they're going to grow their market substantially with them (especially on the VR front -- think virtual meetings, markets, and presentations.)
The real shock is going to be the death of the PC. With the advent of higher resolution virtual displays and augmented reality glasses, the need for a physical screen will finally wane and the PC will be replaced by a bluetooth keyboard and mouse talking to that virtual hardware.
The cloud bubble will finally burst wide open when the US tries to pull the same shit on corporate data that they're doing with email and Microsoft right now. The near violent rejection of US policies by the world that results will cause several corporations to leave the US just to survive, and Bush 47 will be left to wonder what happened to the empire and practice his fiddle.
Lenovo will continue to grow, while HP/Compaq shrinks due to their abysmal build quality and lack of innovation.
Samsung will level off as the market for Android devices becomes saturated, but with their product range, they'll still be a healthy company.
Keep an eye on Chinese companies, as their currency takes over more and more of the international markets from the US dollar and it becomes more and more convenient to deal directly with the Chinese.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Nintendo comes to mind but they will more than likely innovate enough to survive in a niche market...Essentially that will be the case for most companies...they will all 'evolve' instead of die. Most recent example is Blackberry moving from hardware to software and services. More than likely some will lose their luster and not be as big but as TheRaven64 said...it will take more than 10yrs for them to die. Next 20yrs now?....well that is a leap but i don't think you will recognize most of the players by then...
...no wait, whatsitsname, Dice.
They've only been around through two world wars.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Dice ... hahaha :D
Post your predictions for all to see. I'll buy you a beer in 10 years if you're right.
I predict that this won't happen.
Ripping off loyal customers gets you....
Beer based solely on the condition of correctness?
I have 3 predictions:
1) Google will continue it's exponential growth and will be monitoring all aspects of our lives in 10 years.
2) Google will have some missteps and become a minor player or go bankrupt.
3) It will be just ho-hum for Google and things will be about the same.
Where do you want to meet for that beer? I'll be in the corner wearing the tinfoil hat.
Microsoft - Reduced but not out. Mostly a cloud-based service provider in an increasingly cut-throat market. Left the devices market to refocus...went the way of Zune. Struggles to find relevence in the domestic market, but in the business market it will still have a hold thanks to cross-OS standardisation on the .NET platform. That said, its fortunes could change is it rolls out a strong AI on Azure, it could challenge IBM.
Facebook & Twitter, etc - Highly dependent on the outcome of the pending global collapse of the advertising bubble (both online and offline). Advertising is at least 2 orders of magnitude over priced. If they survive on reduced revenue, they may still be around, but at MySpace levels.
Uber - Highly dependent on the political winds. Will most likely encounter numerous well publicised attacks on woman that will generate calls for regulation. Then it is just a taxi company. So, might become a taxi franchise spanning multiple countries. The KFC of taxis.
IBM - These guys are back...big time. They're finally being able to take their work in the defense sectors into the public world. That's strong AI and they have a functioning platform, not just Watson. Most likely IBM will be the Microsoft of the next 30 years. Integrating Watson into corporate SoAs will be big business.
Oracle - Tough times. Its product portfolio doesn't seem to have much in the way of new ideas, or investment in future tech. May have missed the boat because it doesn't see what Google and IBM are doing.
Or maybe just the /. part.
Ten years can be a long time if you've got the cash and a "core business" to eek out existence on. As long as there is a need for new mainframes for the banking industry, IBM will be around. I think they're going to shrink a lot, though.
Agree/Disagree: Change, but focus.
Oracle isn't going anywhere. They're too entrenched.
Disagree - shrink - "born in the cloud".
Apple's market will shrink rather than grow, primarily due to their failure to really innovate. Let's face it, they've been tweaking and fiddling for over five years now rather than coming out with anything new or earth shattering. But they've got the cash to buy an entire nation (or two), so they'll still be around.
Agree - but others will mimick the "everyone can do it/ease"
The same goes for Microsoft. They've got sufficient cash and resources to hang on for a long time, even if their core markets are shrinking. Let's face it -- basic business functionality will always be needed, even if it isn't glamourous and exciting. They'll continue to lose market share to tablets and smell phones in the consumer markets, and will re-focus on their core business of serving business customers.
Disagree/different reason - they need the cloud BIG TIME, or bust.
Uber, Lyft, and the like are going to encounter some rude shocks from the courts in the near future, and their business models will be declared illegal. It's already happening in a lot of districts.
Agree
Google Plus will finally get the axe in 2-3 years, but Google itself will continue along it's merry way.
Twitter will shrink dramatically or disappear entirely as the video capabilities of higher bandwidth and newer/denser technologies make written dialogue even more irrelevant than it is today.
Facebook will still be around, and bigger than ever. They've made a couple of smart investments, and if those play out, they're going to grow their market substantially with them (especially on the VR front -- think virtual meetings, markets, and presentations.)
The real shock is going to be the death of the PC. With the advent of higher resolution virtual displays and augmented reality glasses, the need for a physical screen will finally wane and the PC will be replaced by a bluetooth keyboard and mouse talking to that virtual hardware.
The cloud bubble will finally burst wide open when the US tries to pull the same shit on corporate data that they're doing with email and Microsoft right now. The near violent rejection of US policies by the world that results will cause several corporations to leave the US just to survive, and Bush 47 will be left to wonder what happened to the empire and practice his fiddle.
Disagree - economies will adapt - global economies.
Lenovo will continue to grow, while HP/Compaq shrinks due to their abysmal build quality and lack of innovation.
Disagree - who cares?
Samsung will level off as the market for Android devices becomes saturated, but with their product range, they'll still be a healthy company.
As above.
Keep an eye on Chinese companies, as their currency takes over more and more of the international markets from the US dollar and it becomes more and more convenient to deal directly with the Chinese.
Chinese currency is probably the best point in this post/thread.
Google
Facebook
Twitter
The kids at those firms have done more damage to the Internet than all others combined. Although anyone selling "cloud" services can fuck right off too - hey guys look it's a virtual timeshared machine guys just like in the '60s! Check out how efficiently I have no control over anything!!!!
He shot the sheriff. That's a given. But then he says, "but I did not shoot no deputy". What was the outcome? He did? He didn't? Yes? No?
This is why I come here. To get the answers to all life's questions that don't result in 42.
As you mentioned IBM and their innovations...I just remembered General Electric is also big in a lot areas as well and will also be around for a long time to come. I am more curious as to what will be the next big thing in 10yrs. Is it already here and just emerging or still out there waiting to burst on the scene.
Sony should go bankrupt for obvious reasons (rootkits, bad security, removing features from products that advertised those features) but it seems the general public is dumb as a sack of bricks and keeps buying Sony products...
Ubuntu hasn't made Mark Shuttleworth a cent, and when it becomes obvious that ubuntu won't become a viable phone/tablet OS within North America/Europe, he will pull the plug. Ubuntu itself might live on through its volunteers, but it might get renamed.
Has that company ever made a profit? I am waiting for the shareholders to finally oust that whackjob Bezos and install someone who will finally give the stockholders a return on their investment.
They've been saying that for years, but can't get away from the cash cow any more than Microsoft could stop producing operating systems; but, as their large corporate mainstay customers outgrow the relational database, they will either have to drastically rework their licensing or lose out to highly polished Hadoop stacks like Pivotal's. Oracle's alliance with Cloudera is all well and good, but Impala still needs work. Between Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-Business suite, they will definitely be around, just not the automatic safe choice for a database that they once were.
Bikinis.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Undoing my mistaken mod of the above post by AC (which was for the quote, not the comment!). Too bad all the other posts will be unmoded as well :-(
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
slashdot won't be around at the rate it is going.
What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 10 Years? Facebook
What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 5 Years? Facebook
What Tech Companies You Don't Want Around In 1 Year? Facebook
What Tech Companies You Don't Want Around Tomorrow? Facebook
Wait, Facebook is not a tech company, it is a mental problem... my bad.
Perhaps it's not the best way to predict the future, but looking back at the history of the tech industry does give us some insight of what can survive, what can't
Since I started way back in the 1970's, I've witnessed a lot of really great tech businesses that unfortunately no longer with us
Many of them either got gobbled up by others, or changed their name and/or direction one time too many that they lost their focus to survive
Some of the examples are
"Wang Computers"
"Silicon Graphics"
"DEC"
"ROLM"
Then .. we had really aimless tech companies that are still with us, in one form or another, and it is exemplified by:
"Tucows"
So, what do we learn thus far, from this very brief history lesson of the tech past?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The entire auto industry will be turned on it's head in the next few years when Tesla launches their affordable sedan. I imagine SpaceX will also be doing well and probably already on the way to Mars. I for one, welcome our new Musky overlords.
Dice, Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn etc... all will be replaced by real social networks and employer's own sites. They are all in their death throws currently.
If HP manages to release their memristor technology (and their "The Machine"), some companies in the storage area risk to be shaken. I'm thinking of Seagate, EMC, ...
And I guess some chinese company will emerge. Like Xiaomi.
What's going to die in 10 years is anything in the middle. You either add massive, expensive value (like Apple), or you sell low-end commodity stuff. We're going to see the middle disappear. Companies that brand low-end commodity stuff, like Samsung, without adding value like Apple does, will disappear. Why should anyone pay for your brand when the same hardware is cheaper without a brand?
Amazon's Kindle adds value, but it's not the kind of value anyone wants. The Kindle is just a gateway to spend more money at Amazon. So it's gone. The Nook will be spun off, executives will get their bonuses, and it will be gone. What value does it add? Even B&N can't answer that question.
The opportunity is there for anyone who wants to make better hardware. Low-end commodity stuff is junky. Apple sells hardware that is a good value for the price. They're about the only high-end vendor left. Cheap plastic disposable junk laptops are not suitable for professionals, but the high-end market has been completely given to Apple. Someone needs to step up with a 5-10 year laptop for professionals that runs Windows and Visual Studio.
Anything spun off from IBM or HP is probably gone. Splitting one big dysfunctional company with inertia into lots of little companies that have to actually compete to survive is not going to work.
Anyone who sells printers is gone, as their use will continue to fade. Why buy a photo inkjet when your iPad Mini has 10,000 photos and a retina screen? I just bought ink for the first time in 2+ years. I never print any longer except a few coupons and stuff.
And they really are guesses, because the nature of the industry is that one major hit can save a failing company overnight, while just a couple of expensive disasters can sink a successful company within a year.
EA probably have the potentia to be the highest-profile casualty. Despite their size and notoriety, they've not been doing brilliantly in financial terms for quite a few years now. They've a couple of nasty habits (from the point of view of both the gamer and the shareholder) which contribute to this.
The first is the continual chase after the "last big thing" - EA rarely comes up with new mega-hit formulas itself; rather, it belatedly notices when somebody else produces one, tries to mimic it and usually fails. Hence the expensive and largely unsuccessful attempts to copy the Call of Duty formula with Medal of Honor and Battlefield (the former in particular having been a costly disaster for the company) and the late arrival, whole-hearted embrace of and often embarrassing fiascos in the pay-to-win mobile space.
The second bad habit is that of making expensive acquisitions and then ruining their unique selling points. Bioware is the biggest example here; Dragon Age: Inquisition may do a bit of reputational-repair, but the Bioware brand is much tarnished from when EA acquired it.
EA isn't going to die overnight; if it does die in the next 10 years, it's more likely to be a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of affair, probably with some smaller rump of the company surviving. But despite the fact it has some really talented developers (it makes some amazingly good games, despite its reputation), I just don't think it's smart or agile enough to keep up with Activision, Ubisoft or Square-Enix in the longer term.
The funny thing about EA is that when it's gone, we'll probably miss it. It's used its (now slightly diminishing-returns) cash-cow sports franchises to fund some interesting games like Dead Space that would probably never have been made otherwise.
The next guess is, ironically, a company whose gaming division is doing very well and will likely continue to do very well right up to the point the company (possibly) collapses; Sony. Sony's currently building up the kind of console-wars installed-base lead it hasn't had since the PS2-era and is doing it with much healthier margins than it had during that generation. The problem is that the wider company is a shambles, selling electronic goods that nobody wants. There's still plenty of time for Sony to turn itself around, but it's not absolutely certain that it will.
Nintendo has perhaps the opposite problem; the part of the company that makes and sells consoles is doing pretty badly, while other bits of the business are doing quite well. The Wii-U has failed now. Aafter Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros failed to have a significant impact on sales, it has run out of last chances and even Nintendo themselves seem increasingly reluctant to support it at the expense of the 3DS. It appears almost certain that the Xbox One overtook it on installed base somewhere around October/November, despite the Wii-U's 12 month head start. While the 3DS isn't doing too badly, it's more a "PSP-level" success than a "DS-level" success (though the PSP was indeed a successful machine) and is particularly dependant upon the Japanese market. I don't think Nintendo's going bust, but I suspect that the threat of a shareholder revolt may mean that the Wii-U ends up being the company's last home console (or they may try a panicked and quick-to-fail emergency successor, which will only slightly delay the inevitable). They have some strong brands though and if they can shed the home-console hardware business, they'll probably still be here and still be healthy in 10 years time.
And MS... will be discussed to death elsewhere in this thread. I don't think they're going out of business. I do think it's more uncertain that they will stay in the home console market, however. They've rescued the Xbox One fairly neatly after a disaster of a launch (it's had a
Neural nets are doing amazing things TODAY. Already there is a group that has trained one to identify scenes in photographs (a photo of a girl playing with a dog will be labelled as such). The methodology behind this will be used to train ever more advanced neural nets to do more and more tasks at or above human levels. The concept of technology companies will be moot in 20 years, and they will be on the decline in ten. Instead we will consume technology produced by autonomous computing resources. The singularity will not be far behind.
To echo one of the IBM posts above:
They've only been around through two world wars.
I'm not saying they are invincible, but they probably have the power to survive quite a few huge, massive, complete flops of console releases before they actually would struggle to find investment. If they even needed it.
will go the way of altavista. poor altavista
IBM still sell hardware. In fact they compete with Dell etc. in the small-server market, sometimes successfully.
Nope. Those small severs that compete with Dell are from Lenovo http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/infrastructure/us/en/it-infrastructure/lenovo-acquisition.html
The large tech companies will still be around, but maybe a pivot into occupying the vertical stacks in multiple industries. Now that everyone's had a taste about how to occupy verticals and synergy across domains, there's less of the sitting on laurels, and more of chaining the experiences.
Apple
Google
Cisco
$DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR
In 10 years these will all be official government agencies.
Is that the future will be different in a million different ways that we never expected and never saw coming. And even if we do see something coming, we mprobably won't appreciate the true impact (or lack thereof) that it will have.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Radio Shack. They'll be lucky to survive one year much less ten.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Yep, any time a new technology becomes widespread that can replace your current approach at lower cost, someone is going to take your mass market customers. You can move to the new technology, or let competitors take them.
They're like IBM without the R&D capability. Pets.com may yet make a comeback.
They are not Agile enough and have lost a LOT of ground in the past 3 years.
Honestly unless they do major changes to their business model and replace all of their management to get rid of the microsoft way, they will become a foot-note in the history books.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Remember what is happening these days:
- Companies are abandoning the like of Cisco, Juniper, and other big players and designing their own HW with help from Chinese HW firms. To whit: the Americans still innovate, everyone else copies.
- The aforementioned trend will continue and more and more HW will be innovative, if not outright proprietary. Look at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others. They design their own data center HW, cutting out all middle men, and they get what they want, how they want it. They handle their own support internally, which is how it should always be. Commodity HW is so cheap, they can either virtualise what they need or stand up another server in mere minutes if not seconds.
- The Chinese are the ones to watch. China is hungry, not just economically, but militarily. They are relying less and less on anyone but themselves while the west continues to rely more and more on China. China is one of the few places in the world where special metals are sourced for all manner of tech. We simple don't have this stuff and unless we can find a suitable substitute or figure out a way around it, we are reliant on the Chinese. The west is falling and the east is rising. It happens. It's a cycle. The US is akin to Rome at her apex at the moment. No one can be at the top forever. Usually only a few centuries at most.
http://xkcd.com/1425/
HP in trying to save itself with its new memristor memory applied in a new type of computer with a "new" OS. Hence, it will potentially disrupt the PC markets again as IBM, Microsoft and Apple did. The question is how that new memory implementation proceeds.
HP could develop and produce the machines only by themselves, but that likely wouldn't result in quick adoption needed given that the software would be nill in the beginning. Hence, HP would need SDKs and partners, like Apple willing to produce a premium product. The world's software developers would need to be able to easily port applications for HP to gain a major foothold. No one is going to move Windows to a Memristor Machine, and Microsoft is not into CPU hardware, so is MS out?
No doubt Apple is looking intently at what this means 5 years down the road, as they have very long range plans. Apple could even buy HP, though anti-trust might be an issue. Apple could form a strategic partnership & licensing deal with HP. IBM can tag along on the corporate implementation side. Apple, HP & IBM would be a troika with major power.
One has to ask if the basic box PC makers like Sony, Asus and so forth will survive if the memristor starts to take off. Consumers and businesses are tiring a bit of dealing with constant upgrades every couple years and Apple has shown the way to make products that routinely last 4-5 years. The volume of PCs may decline, but the profits may still hold or go up, possibly.
Hence, we know for sure that cannibalization will occur and it is only which companies will fail to make the switch. They all can't make it, just like the dozens of auto companies after WWII came to an early demise.
At least not in their current form or dominance.
Texas Instrument will be squeezed out in next 5 years.
...because Karma will catch up to them.
Start ups have a 90 percent or more attrition rate in the first year or two. Most of those hot new companies with hot new tech will die a swift death. For every Zuckerberg or Jobs and Woz there are thousands who got laid off when the start up they worked for imploded. So my advice is never ever work for stock options. If a company can't pay your salary, run away.
For the mainstream companies most of them will follow the path used by CA, HP, MS, and IBM; which is to buy innovation. The buy small nimble companies with great tech while killing off or selling older divisions which are not performing. As long as they have a good cash reserve they are going to die off soon.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I remember reading about that HP initiative on /. a year or two ago, and the consensus was "vapor," but /. is very, very cynical. Regardless, I haven't heard a thing about it since. Is there any evidence it's not vapor?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
We will no longer need a DVR, as everything will be on demand.
And yet people point at iOS market share vs Android as some kind of evidence the iPhone is "over." They're making the same mistake pundits have always done with Apple: mistaken them for a software company.
Umm, Apple IS a software company. They don't give their software away, the just sell it attached to a piece of hardware. Their hardware is nothing particularly special. A Mac is barely different from a Dell hardware-wise and if you put Windows on the Mac you can't tell the difference. Nobody would pay a premium to Apple for a Mac with Windows on it so the difference MUST be in the software because that is all that is really different. The hardware is a commodity and Apple does not manufacture any of it themselves. The iPhone is nice but you could just as easily load Android on the hardware. Almost the entire reason people buy Apple products and pay a premium is due to the software. They are fundamentally a software company that just won't sell you the software without some commodity hardware attached.
They sell hardware.
They sell a vertically integrated platform which includes both software and hardware. Apple does not just sell hardware.
People would talk about the installed user base of Macs vs. Windows, when Apple does not compete with Microsoft (directly), they compete with Dell and Lenovo and HP and every other PC hardware company.
Incorrect. Apple competes with HP+Microsoft and Lenovo+Microsoft and Dell+Microsoft. Notice that Microsoft is there each time. They compete quite directly with Microsoft via OEM sales. A sale for Apple is explicitly not a sale for Microsoft + whatever hardware vendor their stuff comes bundled with. If that isn't the definition of competition I don't really know what is.
I away figured Microsoft had enough money to not die until the early 2020's.
Microsoft won't die. Unless they are weapons-grade stupid the worst case scenario for them is that they use their cash horde to buy their way into another line of business. They have an absurd amount of cash. They could buy majority stakes in both Ford and GM today with cash if they wanted to. Not saying that's a good idea but they can buy all but a handful of companies on the planet without even issuing a dime of debt or equity to do it.
No, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. They might not resemble their current form in 20 years but they're certainly going to be around for a long while.
I predict you won't get me a beer even if I am right.
Intersil, Micrel, Fairchild, IDT, Microsemi, Power Integrations will die to lack of enough integration to compete with TI, costs too high to compete with Asian suppliers.
Maxim and Analog Devices will merge or die, or merge and fail to integrate the cultures. On the other hand, the TI/Nat Semi merger was very well executed, so hopefully MaxADI will be a good competitor to TI "The Borg".
Atmel and Microchip will decline unless they completely scrap their 8-/16-bit stuff (which can't compete with the likes of Holtek, let alone no-name Chinese copies, on price for the volume markets) and accept that the future is ARM for emerging (14 to 24 year old) developers/hobbyists, and invest in same. That means a one-time major restructuring with massive layoffs, timed so the same financial year covers the kill stage and some good story at the end. Also, design last time buys carefully spread over years so as not to piss off the faithful engineers that design 'em in. Oh, and stop spending money on the discrete analog lines (MCHP particularly), but use the cores as value add to the ARM systems-on-a-chip. And no, the days of value-pricing those features are gone - the features win you the socket now, they don't get you the high margin.
Which companies will be around in 10 years? Companies that are in the business of acquiring, managing, and selling your data to others as well as selling other's data to you. The hardware and software do not matter. Those will always be there, of course, but the players will change as they have in the past. No one remembers Data General (a hardware manufacturer despite their name) or Amdahl or Compaq. For Microsoft, the success of their cloud services is the key to their survival. IBM, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Ebay...Yes. HP, Dell, Oracle, Sun...no.
For me the first two that come to mind... F-5 and Riverbed. F-5 has a few security suites and data mining services that haven't really caught hold, but the vast majority of their business is still load balancing. As SDN becomes more prevalent, much of that requirement will go away. Same goes for Riverbed, they have network and application performance monitors, but their core business is still WAN acceleration. With the combination of bandwidth becoming cheaper and less traffic being able to be optimized over the WAN (VDI is becoming much more prevalent and PCoIP doesn't do particularly well / video is becoming more of the percentage of the WAN utilization anyway / etc..) I could see them being in trouble.
It is an old-boy club. They have a nominal girl here and there, but in engineering the guy-to-girl ratio, even given HR-driven bounties to incent hiring more girls than guys and more minorities than majorities even with an abundance of h1b Visas is worse than 5 guys to every girl. The point isn't that they are sexist, it is that they are archaic. They are not agile or lean. They have huge "ivory towers" or "silos" where there is within-company sabotage of objectives. It is a house divided - competitive management. That has kept them being a functional "fast follower" because leading is too expensive, but it populates leadership with enough "wolves" to be a predatory fast follower.
They just threw 5 billion at tablets to realize 1 million in the last quarter. It was such a stunning debacle that the Tablet organization was "reorg-ed" and merged into a different group. That is the same as admitting defeat and killing that organization. The problem with that is that tablet/smartphones are 75% of all silicon and Intel isn't in that space. They no longer own the silicon market. All the technology development is going to be done by someone else for a different product, or rest entirely on Intel's shoulders. It is not going to be resting on the shoulders of an ecosystem of silicon shops. This is where the large-scale leadership ecosystem goes "pear shaped". Being the sole player in a game nobody wants is a losing proposition. They have the cloud, for a little while - to keep them in revenue. They play some dirty pool and do some deals with folks - whatever. That is not the same as how they (if ever) get their next $50 billion. A number of shops (Apple, Oracle, ...) have discovered that when they own the silicon IP, then they don't pay markup to Intel. This trend is growing over time which means the market in which to have market-share is shrinking. If Intel had a very efficient leadership then they could cost less and still make good decisions - and when your revenue collapses that is what you need in place. If they don't have year-over-year growth then without the excuse of a worldwide recession they are going to make a revolving door at the top of people who make promises. This is really called flailing around looking for money. The lack of great, consistent, and visionary leadership at the top is going to substantially eliminate any net motion in any direction but down.
I will be surprised if Intel grosses more than $20B/yr in 2020.
Ten years can be a long time if you've got the cash and a "core business" to eek out existence on
Exactly right. Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc all have huge cash hordes and aren't going to disappear in the next 25 years because they can simply buy their way into another line of business if needed.
Apple's market will shrink rather than grow, primarily due to their failure to really innovate.
I think you are making the common mistake that most people make about Apple's pace of innovation. Apple only produces about 1-2 big innovations per decade. Their last big product introduction (the iPad) has only been around since 2010 and the iPhone only came out in 2007 and the iPod/iTunes was in 2001. It's going to take some time but I think ApplePay has the potential to be a huge product for Apple. It's certainly the most interesting thing they've done lately and nobody (even Google) has something quite as slick. I think the Apple watch is going to be DOA but maybe not. I just don't think they got the use case right on that one - I don't see what itch it scratches. Anyway the point is that Apple introduces a big product every 5-10 years and always has. If they haven't done anything of note by 2020 then we should start to wonder about what's going on.
Facebook will still be around, and bigger than ever. They've made a couple of smart investments, and if those play out, they're going to grow their market substantially with them (especially on the VR front -- think virtual meetings, markets, and presentations.)
What smart investments? I think Facebook has been wildly overpaying for some pretty speculative stuff. I think their VR investments are going to wither and die. Nobody is going to use Occulus VR headsets for business meetings. Ever. I was doing work in VR 15 years ago and it is the very definition of a niche market. The use cases are gaming and then what? There is a modest market in games but geeks are hugely overestimating it and frankly Facebook hugely over paid for Occulus in my opinion. I just don't see the use cases to justify the investment. I don't mind being wrong in this case but I just don't see the ROI. MAYBE if they have a breakthrough in augmented reality but Occulus isn't even really working on that right now.
The real shock is going to be the death of the PC. With the advent of higher resolution virtual displays and augmented reality glasses, the need for a physical screen will finally wane and the PC will be replaced by a bluetooth keyboard and mouse talking to that virtual hardware.
Complete nonsense. The PC isn't going anywhere. Tablets will eat some but not all of the market. There is no way in hell VR displays are going to do away with monitors. Augmented reality is still science fiction for the time being and even should it become practical it isn't going to replace the PC. The potential use cases for augmented reality products are quite different than for PCs.
Most likely, and the most obvious, least risk path is to not try to be revolutionary with it. You have a storage element. Use it as that - make your non-volatile memory out of it. I mean, flash memory has its uses, but also its limitations that limit its uses (like limited lifespan). Memristor doesn't have lifespan issues so why not use it as extremely fast storage media? We're hitting the limits of flash memory density vs. lifespan, so this technology can be immediately put to use to increase storage capacities and system performance in a traditional computer.
That's the way to proceed first - a revolutionary OS that uses memristors as "RAM" with persistence is innovative, but high risk and requires a lot of outside thinking. Replacing SSD storage with memristor instead of flash, not as risky and lets us explore the technology in the meantime. And yes, it'll disrupt industry because the traditional flash producers now have a product with a distinct disadvantage.
Far too often products failed because they failed to take in market inertia - be too different and people shun it because it's different. (Especially if they can't tell it's different because of bugs or different because of technology).
As the technology matures, the other applications will come out.
Their reason for existing. The long term survivors ofter have a 2nd, 3rd or more. MicroSoft had five: BASIC, DOS, Windows, Office and Xbox. Apple had Apple 2, Mac/laser-printing, iPod/iTunes, iPhone/apps, and iPad. Both those companies had plenty of failures along the way too. Google has Search, AdWords, YouTube and Android. They need more money-making ideas.
I want shareholders to stuff it up their assholes. They do not RUN the company...
No, they OWN the company. It is their company and their property. It's entirely appropriate that they make their feelings known about how management is handling their property. It would be no different than you hiring a groundskeeper for your lawn. You have every right to tell the groundskeeper how you want things done because it is your property, not his.
and this bullshit law that forces companies to chase profits above all else has done nothing but ruin the world
Really? Tell you what. Go visit someplace like Somalia where there are essentially no companies "chasing profits" and then tell me that companies have "done nothing but ruin the world". Go see the poverty and lawlessness and desperation. The very fact you can read this and argue about it is due to those very same companies you seem to love to hate. The food you eat and the bed you sleep in so comfortably is thanks to those companies.
I remember reading about that HP initiative on /. a year or two ago, and the consensus was "vapor," but /. is very, very cynical. Regardless, I haven't heard a thing about it since. Is there any evidence it's not vapor?
A little while back HP did a big reveal on everything they've been working on, basically with the intention of getting other stakeholders involved. The impression I got was there is one or two roadblocks left, but couldn't be described as vapor. Worst case scenario is they'll cover their loses selling the tech on.
I think they'll probably be smaller, but they aren't "Agile" enough? Agile is not a real concept, it's just stupid business talk.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Every single company which is small to medium in size and claims to be in the "social media" (i.e., fake business which does nothing and adds nothing of value to society) sector will not exist in ten years. You have to actually do something to have a viable business.
I spent 7 years in Korea, home of the world's fastest internet. In the mid 2000s, man video and DVD store closed because of streaming companies and how easy it was to get video content to your TV. When I left in 2013 there were none. Coming back to the USA, I was surprised to find RedBox selling DVDs - who ships protons anymore? Shipping electrons to watch movies is where its going. Redbox and any other physical-medium content sharing should die.
- Nintendo: looking increasingly uncompetitive
- Corpse of Nokia (the part owned by MS). MS will never gain any traction in mobile. This toiled for flushing the cash will be exterminated by MS, after a drawn out, and dismal failure. Windows will never get any traction in mobile - its market share is still slipping today. MS will have to kill its mobile division, sooner rather than later.
- Oracle - at least in its current form. If it is still around, it will be very much shrunken, out of hardware, and with a massively diminished market share in databases. I can't believe that anyone would make a new deployment for the majority of tasks. Yes, there are areas where it has value, such as its database, but it simply isn't the best choice for most use cases. I think the consulting division is a different matter. It might be a target for the likes of SAP or IBM, particularly Oracle weakens.
- Microsoft? It is prime to be broken up, due to its monopoly position, but I think it owns too many corrupt American politicians for this to be easy. Windows is looking very tired, and is plagued with usability and security problems. There are better free alternatives. Office will suffer a similar fate, being replaced by free software, and free software as a service. Windows/Office accounts for nearly all of microsoft's income. It may sound surprising now, but I think it will happen. Ten years is a very, very, very long time in the software industry. Vendor lock-in is viewed with great suspicion by modern IT departments. Only the incompetent still buy in to it. It is akin to management loosing control over their own destiny, and in several companies has contributed to sacking of IT directors.
- Apple - I can't see it remaining competitive with cheaper products that are superior and not locked into a straight-jacket of Apple control. Unless Apple can pull something game changing out of the hat, it looks like it will be a steady loss of market share, and shrinking margins. Apple has had its nine lives, and there comes a time when it won't be pulled back from the brink. It won't happen right now, but it will be a steady decline. Ten years might be sufficient for it to burn through the whole cash stockpile, and shareholders will want a big bite of that cash stockpile if Apple can't deliver the profits in the shorter term. The tablet / smartphone market certainly won't vanish, but it is beginning to stagnate. Margins will become slim, and cheap hardware will be on offer, with a specification and price that Apple simply can't match, just like what happened to the PC market/Macintosh. Apple has the handicap of not really being the designer/manufacturer of most of the key parts of their products, in addition to not really being the author of their own operating system (it mostly being a mish-mash of the rotting entrails of legacy mach/BSD). Anyone who has done system programming on OS X will have seen some of the rot.
- HP? While the memristor patents may have some value, I doubt that they will be the only non-volatile memory player, and the technology is very immature compares to current bulk CMOS, which is also increasing in density very fast. It remains to be seen what latencies and access times are actually like. Will other technologies offer similar density/performance? I can't see much else of unique value in HP's portfolio, but that's only my personal view.
- Dell - no. Low margin, very average hardware. Mediocre support, at least from what I have heard from IT professionals, who educated me about their lack of ability to make Dell NAS appliances work properly in a mixed Linux / Windows environment. This was not cheap gear.
IBM is plowing a billion into buzzwords they can't even define internally. And Watson. Luckily for everyone but the shareholders they have enough cash to burn it in piles.
See title.
Apple's market will shrink rather than grow, primarily due to their failure to really innovate.
I think Apple's failure won't be because of a lack of innovation. Instead, it's because of the practice of making very small incremental changes to their products, rather than just releasing something completely new. Because they take their sweet time between scheduled releases, competitors overtake them. They could have had a Retina display with all of their devices at once, but instead decided to drag it out with changes to one device, then another, then another.
In short, they need to get their shit together and start bringing new ideas to the table right now, instead of following this old policy of "it's not what you include in an update, it's what you don't".
It;s a good question if any of us will be here. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one."
Red Hat will still be there; systemd is crap, but people who need to learn it. There is a man page. They got away with worse (selinux, their network script, pppd, etc). They have a steady income stream in Enterprise.
Oracle may not be; Motorola, Ericsson and Blackberry will all fade and shrink, or be bought over.
M$ will be smaller, but still probably there if they manage to do one thing without making a total mess of it. That is a tall order for them. Xiaomi may kick Samsung's ass but they will both probably survive. I see a fallout in newspapers, magazines, and reading matter generally as prople go vitrual.
Apple is a platform company, and always has been. The user experience is driven by software running on applicable hardware. Apple started as a hardware company, and has always focused on having a reliable platform. A Jobs snippet taken out of context doesn't mean much.
"Platform company"? I could live with that except that pretty much the only thing Apple actually makes (not designs - makes) themselves is software and almost everything that actually makes their products meaningfully different is software. They outsource ALL production of hardware and the hardware they produce is for all practical purposes identical to their competitors. Sure they put their little spin on it and the hardware is nice but it doesn't truly set them apart. If Apple started selling Macs with Windows preloaded or iPhones with Android preloaded, their ability command the margins they do would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Anything you outsource 100% is not core to your business if you plan on remaining in business for long.
And the Jobs quote wasn't out of context. The video speaks entirely for itself and I've seen the entire interview where he made that statement. Steve Jobs himself said quite plainly and without equivocation that Apple at its core is a software company. And in this case I pretty much agree with him. Whether you like Jobs or not he very clearly understood what made Apple successful and what set them apart from their competition. And the core of that differentiation is software.
On this, just about everyone will disagree. Their hardware is different, performs within published specs, and lasts better and longer than any competitor.
So good of you to speak for everyone. Fact is that the hardware in any mac made since they moved to Intel chips is not meaningfully different from PCs. The CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, memory and the rest are almost identical to similarly spec'd PCs. The cases are pretty and they do a better than average job supporting them (for the limited time they do support them) but the hardware demonstrably is not different. Their iDevices are slightly more customized but realistically aren't much different than their competition either. ARM CPUs, same memory, same glass, etc. Hell Apple even sued Samsung because according to Apple the hardware on devices Samsung was selling were barely distinguishable. Even at it's most extreme Apple's hardware is at most marginally different from that of their competitors.
If you want to claim that Macs or iDevices "last longer" you'll have to provide some actual evidence to support that assertion. I've seen no credible evidence to support your position.
And you knew this, so why do you state they're a software company?
Because the software is what differentiates their products. Software is near-as-makes-no-difference the only thing that Apple themselves makes that they do not outsource. They design some hardware but they don't make it - they don't even assemble it. A company is what it does. Apple makes software and then designs some pretty boxes out of mostly commodity hardware to sell it in which someone else makes and distributes. Apple is at its core a software company because that is where they make their money.
But it has been that for a lot longer than 30 years. Shareholders get to fire the board and time value of money calculations make it so you want your money ASAP. So they always go for short term profit. It is the economic law.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Looks like they've more recently followed up with a "new OS" announcement for the machine called Linux++, which one would assume is a modified Linux. That's supposed to be the stopgap to Carbon their ground up new OS:
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
So still some movement, and 6 months is a bit better than "3 years" or whatever the standard it-will-never-happen date is for computing (for fusion it's 20 years apparently).
Sam