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.

Comments

Ten years?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Ten years?

[netsavior]

Classic example: Kodak.

Since kodak was the inventor of the digital camera... this is actually a classic COUNTER-example.
Kodak actually failed when it wasted BILLIONS in the 1980s trying to expand its product line... 5.1 billion dollars for a drug company that they then ran into the ground, then tons of money in R&D trying to build a better Alkaline battery (because the battery was going to be the new "film" - disposable repeat purchase - once digital took off).

Kodak invented itself into oblivion, not the other way around.

Re:Ten years?

[peragrin]

I away figured Microsoft had enough money to not die until the early 2020's. Of course that was under the assumption that Ballmer would still be I charge until 2018 which is what his long term plan always was. His getting kicked out early means Microsoft might survive.

Microsoft basically had two profitable divisions windows and office. I saw office slowly losing out to alternatives and windows not losing market share but profitability because of netbooks. You can't sell a computer for $$250 when $50 goes to Microsoft.

Maybe with ballmers early release Microsoft can shift enough to survive

Re:Ten years?

[Marginal Coward]

Kodak always made cameras, though mainly just to sell film, which was always an enormous cash cow for them. They vigorously pursued the digital camera market but basically lost to Canon, Fuji, and Nikon on some combination of features and price. So, they were doing many of the right things, just not doing them well enough to compete. As you point out, they also probably did some wrong things when they saw that film was dying, but that's just part of the process of reinvention.

If Kodak was once a "film" company, they were really a chemical company, rather than a camera company. In that vein, one of their little-known successes in the reinvention department is their spinoff of Eastman Chemical, which currently is a thriving $11B company.

Re:Ten years?

[meta-monkey]

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. Apple gives the software away for nothing, or practically nothing. They 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. Apple doesn't compete with free Android software...Apple competes with Samsung and Motorola and LG, and does just fine against them.

(Note, I am not an Apple fanboy. Santa brought me a Nexus 6 and I'm very happy with it)

IBM is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IBM is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet IBM is still hiring and working there is comfortable: work is easy, plenty of benefits, and you get paid well.

hum... paid well? As someone who works there, this is not really the case. IBM has indeed turned into a perfect example of how not to be in tech. Aside from specific research areas IBM has struggled, not meeting deadlines, outsourcing without caring for quality on the deliver, not to mention that is just got caught up on its own compulsion to control results that you have projects that get delayed and even axed due to poor internal auditing reviews. Feedback is an area where IBM struggles the most: There is no communication accross the board, salaries are quite low (maybe that can be different on US, but everywhere else it is lagging behind). It is indeed comfortable to work there as infrastructure is rather good on some things, but the truth is that I have to agree that I don't think IBM is going away, what they will be doing in 10 years is anyone's guess, but since they have sold pretty much anything they could, there is no way of knowing where we'll be

Yahoo and HP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yahoo and HP

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

You might be right, especially for the consumer-side of HP. The enterprise side, however, will never go away. We might get sold off again (SABRE, EDS, etc) but the actual day-to-day business has to be done by someone, and much of it is so regulated only so much of it can be moved overseas. Thus why Meg went with the ES side...my job can't be outsourced overseas without some huge legislative changes since we 1) have the mainframes here in the building and those can't really be moved 2) it's all tightly regulated, especially the airline and banking stuff. Personally, I love my job. I basically sit all night and watch Netflix, waiting for some system somewhere to hicup. Jump on the call, take some notes, send out some emails, fill out some incident reports and I'm done. "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."

Re:Yahoo and HP

[Critical Facilities]

Yep, I have to say I agree.

I was with EDS prior to, and then through the HP takeover. I lasted a couple of years once HP had the wheel, and my experience was pretty much the same as yours. Lots of inefficiency, layer upon layer upon layer of "management" and "leaders", none of whom knew anything about the others. It was a poorly run, rudderless organization and at first, I was amazed that it was even functioning.

But, as you astutely point out, so much of the enterprise business simply can't be moved for legal reasons, or the cost to move the stuff is so immense, it would take many years of active, focused effort (and billions and billions of dollars) to move it. In my Data Center, we had a lot of the major airlines as clients as well as some of the financial and regulatory clients, so I know exactly what you mean.

By the way, for what it's worth, when I left HP, I went to work for another ITO provider. Another major, Fortune 100 corporation that you would definitely know (I just would prefer not to name them here). I can tell you that it's actually the same here, if not worse. No one knows which way is up, I can't believe the ship hasn't sunk, but there is so much money on the line and so many clients hanging on for dear life that we're golden. I do hope that companies like mine and like the HP's and IBM's of the world figure out that the current course of action isn't maintainable. You can't keep running your ITO organizations so poorly and expect to be able to stay competitive. True, today there are only a handful of enterprise grade ITO companies that can truly provide the service for gigantic corporations, and it does take a surprising amount of money to operate a company like this. But, it's only a matter or time before someone with some money decides to put together a REAL ITO company that is actually run well, and when that happens, goodnight HP, IBM, and others. I don't think it'll happen soon, because the market is still so dependent on legacy providers, but it's inevitable, I believe.

Re:Apple's comeback was obvious

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[CastrTroy]

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.

The future

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Looking back ...

[Taco Cowboy]

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?

Re:10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[Tom]

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.