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.
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.
If you're afraid creating a new product will cannibalise your current market, some other company will create the product and cannibalise your market for you.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Or maybe just the /. part.
IBM is like toenail fungus . . . it never really completely goes away.
They used to sell hardware . . . now they sell services.
In the future, the name IBM will still be around, but I don't know what they will be selling then.
They don't know yet either.
One of my predictions for 2015 is that IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty will get the golden parachute.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Completely dying is one thing, but heading on a clear and irreversible decline, or transitioning from an innovation company to a company with a steady, roughly fixed income stream is a lot more common.
To be really vague about what's going to happen in the next 10 years:
--------------
There's going to be some out of left field killer apps for various platforms; out of left field new hardware; and especially combinations thereof. In some cases it will be established players that capitalize on the new must-haves, but in other case it'll be brand new players that rise from nothing to become giants. Many others on the sidelines who missed the trend will rush in and and try to snipe off market share. Few will be effective, at least in the short term.
A few new greedy bastards who we love to hate will take the stage. We'll cheer as some established names go down. We'll mourn the cases where a good product dies to an inferior one due to inferior marketing strategy, managerial incompetence, and/or scummy tactics on behalf of competitors.
And all the while we'll get lots of fun new toys that change our lives in ways from the subtle to the transformative. :)
--------------
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
I think AI advances will be important for the economy and our way of life, but the *existing* tech sector won't be too disrupted by it. (Weak) AI opens up new markets for tech companies, which will make many non-tech jobs obsolete and pump *lots* of cash into the tech sector.
Jobs which computers are already good at, ie. following an explicit list of instructions very quickly, will *not* be affected by AI, since an AI approach would take longer to train than just writing down a program, it would make more mistakes and it would be nowhere near as efficient.
Strong AI (Artificial General Intelligence) would definitely be more disruptive, but we're not going to see that in the next 10 years. If we treat Google as the "singularity moment" for weak AI (automatic data mining), I'd say we're currently at about 1910 in terms of strong AI. There are some interesting philosophical and theoretical arguments taking place, there are some interesting challenges and approaches proposed, there are some efforts to formalise these, but the whole endeavour still looks too broad and open-ended to implement. We need a Goedel to show us that there are limits, we need a Turing to show how a machine can reach that limit, we need a whole load of implementors to build those machines and we need armies of researchers to experiment with them. It took about 100 years to go from Hilbert's challenges to Google; I don't know how long it will take to go from Kurzweil's techno-rapture to a useful system.
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.
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.
IBM will stay around for a long, long time because they spend a ridiculous amount on research and development. I know this is an imperfect metric, but IBM has has been granted the most US patents for twenty straight years. These patents are good for over a billion dollars in licensing rights each year, and give IBM blanket immunity from patent infringement lawsuits from any practicing entity. IBM created technology as varied as excimer lasers used for LASIK surgeries, microprocessors used in the Playstation 3, XBox 360, and the Wii, bar codes, and Watson.
IBM has moved from mainframes to data analysis. Heck, IBM has announced deals with Apple to push into the enterprise and with Twitter to mine data. IBM will be around for a long, long time. Even if it suffers huge setbacks and missteps, its patent portfolio will keep it in the running for a long, long, time.
There's this story about IBM, the patent troll. A bunch of IBM dudes show up at Sun Microsystems claiming infringement of seven patents. After the IBM presentation, the Sun guys get up and explain in detail how these patents are all bullshit, and not infringed. The IBM dudes say, well, we have 10,000 patents. We can go back to our office and come back with seven patents that you do infringe. Sun had to write a check.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/200...
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.