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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."
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.
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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.
Everyone started building them, but it would have been a short-lived fad if Intel hadn't put the USB controller in their southbridge chips and if Microsoft hadn't fixed their USB driver issues. The iMac wasn't a big enough market to sustain USB by itself, and it could have ended up as the new ADB (expensive and Apple-only) if the rest of the industry didn't jump on board. Remember the iMac also shipped with FireWire, which sadly didn't take off and is now gone from new Macs. Most PCs didn't come with FireWire and most that did used the 4-pin ports, which didn't have power and so were much less useful, but meant that devices ended up not drawing power from FireWire either, adding another reason for FireWire to be more expensive than USB.
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Mostly agree with this. Most of the companies mentioned are too big and entrenched to be displaced in is little as 10 years. I think Microsoft still has a chance in the phone and tablet market. The Surface is really the best tablet out there if you want to get some work done and have the money to spend on it. There's some other low end offerings like the HP stream tablets that look promising. Running full Windows on a $100-$150 device seems like it would have some big advantages. If it isn't powerful enough to give a good experience, a few years of Moore's law will take care of that. As the owner of a Surface 2, I find Windows 8 to be the best OS for large tablets. iOS and Android are too focused on one-app-at-a-time and work better for small screen devices like phones. On large tablets you end up missing out on a lot of functionality that a large screen can bring.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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 real shock is going to be the death of the PC.
Again? Didn't it already die two dozen times? Oh wait, those were all predictions that didn't come true.
Keep an eye on Chinese companies,
mod parent +1 insightful just for that sentence. The stupid assumption that will ruin most of the predictions I've read so far is that US companies will continue to dominate the tech industry. But real innovation out of the USA has become scarce. Uber and crap are not innovators, they're basically the Internet equivalent of software patents - you take something that's been known for centuries and add "with a computer program" to it, voila, new patent. Same with most US-based "revolutionary" startups. Take something old and boring, add "over the Internet" to it, voila, investor capital.
Meanwhile, in Asia a thousand companies have been working on evolutionary progress quietly for a decade. Such evolutionary progress is very often the predecessor to revolutionary advances, as it reaches a critical mass.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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