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?

[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.

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

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

[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.

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."