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.

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: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.