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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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Nintendo comes to mind but they will more than likely innovate enough to survive in a niche market...Essentially that will be the case for most companies...they will all 'evolve' instead of die. Most recent example is Blackberry moving from hardware to software and services. More than likely some will lose their luster and not be as big but as TheRaven64 said...it will take more than 10yrs for them to die. Next 20yrs now?....well that is a leap but i don't think you will recognize most of the players by then...
They've only been around through two world wars.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
USB was a standard developed by Intel in the first place to be put into the South Bridge. Apple was one of the first adopters though. So yes, even without Apple, USB would have become ubiquitious, part of every Intel chipset.
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.
Or maybe just the /. part.
I was gonna say Dice,based on how they are fucking up Slashdot.
They've been saying that for years, but can't get away from the cash cow any more than Microsoft could stop producing operating systems; but, as their large corporate mainstay customers outgrow the relational database, they will either have to drastically rework their licensing or lose out to highly polished Hadoop stacks like Pivotal's. Oracle's alliance with Cloudera is all well and good, but Impala still needs work. Between Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-Business suite, they will definitely be around, just not the automatic safe choice for a database that they once were.
With any two contradictory premises you can prove any unrelated third premise. Example:
If 1) this post was written in Iceland, and 2) this post was not written in Iceland, then 3) blue whales are fluent in Swahili.
For it to be false that the third premise follows from the first two, there must exists at least one case where the first two premises are true but the third one is not. Included in that requirement is therefore the requirement that there must be at least one case where the first two premises are true. Since they are contradictory, this cannot occur, and thus cannot be a case where the first two are true and the third is false. Thus the third premise follows from the first two.
You can do weird things with logic like that. One of my favorites is, "In any bar where there are people who may or may not be drinking, there will always exist at least one person who, if he is drinking, everyone else in the bar is drinking".
Which sounds ridiculous. But you have two possibilities: either everyone is drinking, or there's at least one person who's not drinking. If everyone is drinking, then your "one person" can be any of them. If not everyone is drinking, you can pick any one person who isn't drinking to be your "one person". Since the statement has a premise "If he is drinking" - that premise immediately fails, and so there is no requirement in the rules of logic that the second part "everyone else in the bar is drinking" must hold.
It's a logically consistent statement, but breaks the expectations of conversational language. A reader naturally wants to interpret it as meaning that there's going to be a person who, if he suddenly decides to start drinking, then everyone in the bar is going to suddenly pick up a glass and start drinking. But the statement in its basest form doesn't claim that, it is only a description of a moment of time and requires no consistency on who does what between different time periods.
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
Bikinis.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Undoing my mistaken mod of the above post by AC (which was for the quote, not the comment!). Too bad all the other posts will be unmoded as well :-(
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 10 Years? Facebook
What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 5 Years? Facebook
What Tech Companies You Don't Want Around In 1 Year? Facebook
What Tech Companies You Don't Want Around Tomorrow? Facebook
Wait, Facebook is not a tech company, it is a mental problem... my bad.
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 entire auto industry will be turned on it's head in the next few years when Tesla launches their affordable sedan. I imagine SpaceX will also be doing well and probably already on the way to Mars. I for one, welcome our new Musky overlords.
I predict that beer will be hard to collect from Anonymous Coward. On the other hand I predict that Anonymous Coward will still be around on slashdot and posting comments every day.
If HP manages to release their memristor technology (and their "The Machine"), some companies in the storage area risk to be shaken. I'm thinking of Seagate, EMC, ...
And I guess some chinese company will emerge. Like Xiaomi.
What's going to die in 10 years is anything in the middle. You either add massive, expensive value (like Apple), or you sell low-end commodity stuff. We're going to see the middle disappear. Companies that brand low-end commodity stuff, like Samsung, without adding value like Apple does, will disappear. Why should anyone pay for your brand when the same hardware is cheaper without a brand?
Amazon's Kindle adds value, but it's not the kind of value anyone wants. The Kindle is just a gateway to spend more money at Amazon. So it's gone. The Nook will be spun off, executives will get their bonuses, and it will be gone. What value does it add? Even B&N can't answer that question.
The opportunity is there for anyone who wants to make better hardware. Low-end commodity stuff is junky. Apple sells hardware that is a good value for the price. They're about the only high-end vendor left. Cheap plastic disposable junk laptops are not suitable for professionals, but the high-end market has been completely given to Apple. Someone needs to step up with a 5-10 year laptop for professionals that runs Windows and Visual Studio.
Anything spun off from IBM or HP is probably gone. Splitting one big dysfunctional company with inertia into lots of little companies that have to actually compete to survive is not going to work.
Anyone who sells printers is gone, as their use will continue to fade. Why buy a photo inkjet when your iPad Mini has 10,000 photos and a retina screen? I just bought ink for the first time in 2+ years. I never print any longer except a few coupons and stuff.
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
Missing the point. I wasn't talking about USB, I was talking about Apple. So when Apple built a plastic colour Mac, and everybody started building plastic colour accessories, the future looked bright for Apple.
I'm just curious here, what damage have these companies done to the internet?
The non-google, non-facebook, non-twitter internet is still there, and it's bigger then it's ever been! we're having a discussion on it right now!
Neural nets are doing amazing things TODAY. Already there is a group that has trained one to identify scenes in photographs (a photo of a girl playing with a dog will be labelled as such). The methodology behind this will be used to train ever more advanced neural nets to do more and more tasks at or above human levels. The concept of technology companies will be moot in 20 years, and they will be on the decline in ten. Instead we will consume technology produced by autonomous computing resources. The singularity will not be far behind.
A quick Google saves a lot of idle speculation:
"It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million (i.e., 1Â per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion."
To echo one of the IBM posts above:
They've only been around through two world wars.
I'm not saying they are invincible, but they probably have the power to survive quite a few huge, massive, complete flops of console releases before they actually would struggle to find investment. If they even needed it.
Don't worry mate, no-one would ever dream of thinking you're gay, despite your vigorous protests indicating otherwise. They do think you're a bigoted prick, however.
Is that the future will be different in a million different ways that we never expected and never saw coming. And even if we do see something coming, we mprobably won't appreciate the true impact (or lack thereof) that it will have.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Are you saying you'd go into Politalics?
Just another proletarian malcontent.
Radio Shack. They'll be lucky to survive one year much less ten.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Yep, any time a new technology becomes widespread that can replace your current approach at lower cost, someone is going to take your mass market customers. You can move to the new technology, or let competitors take them.
They are not Agile enough and have lost a LOT of ground in the past 3 years.
Honestly unless they do major changes to their business model and replace all of their management to get rid of the microsoft way, they will become a foot-note in the history books.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I want shareholders to stuff it up their assholes. They do not RUN the company, and this bullshit law that forces companies to chase profits above all else has done nothing but ruin the world. Noisy Loud Shareholders are scumbags that need to GTFO.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hate to be a pedant, but, original iMac didn't ship with firewire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
New connectors don't have to replace USB and be a jack of all trades connector. FireWire was the second best way to connect an external disk compared to e-sata or external scsi. It was also the best way to connect low latency audio devices.
I mean, it'd be nice if USB 4 lowers CPU overhead even more and makes extremely low latency devices possible.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
GE is big is into a diversified portfolio. They have finance, broadcast, production, locomotive, jet engines, etc. But they no longer make consumer electronics and appliances - they've simply sold their name off to Asian manufacturers.
...because Karma will catch up to them.
Start ups have a 90 percent or more attrition rate in the first year or two. Most of those hot new companies with hot new tech will die a swift death. For every Zuckerberg or Jobs and Woz there are thousands who got laid off when the start up they worked for imploded. So my advice is never ever work for stock options. If a company can't pay your salary, run away.
For the mainstream companies most of them will follow the path used by CA, HP, MS, and IBM; which is to buy innovation. The buy small nimble companies with great tech while killing off or selling older divisions which are not performing. As long as they have a good cash reserve they are going to die off soon.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I remember reading about that HP initiative on /. a year or two ago, and the consensus was "vapor," but /. is very, very cynical. Regardless, I haven't heard a thing about it since. Is there any evidence it's not vapor?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Uhm, the difference between firewire and USB is licensing.
Firewire requires you buy a license to make Firewire devices.
USB requires you adhere to the spec and don't use their name in vain.
THAT is why USB is ubiquitous. Because someone can make a 0.1 cent USB controller for their 10 cent USB flash drive, and the same flash drive would cost $15 if it were Firewire.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
I away figured Microsoft had enough money to not die until the early 2020's.
Microsoft won't die. Unless they are weapons-grade stupid the worst case scenario for them is that they use their cash horde to buy their way into another line of business. They have an absurd amount of cash. They could buy majority stakes in both Ford and GM today with cash if they wanted to. Not saying that's a good idea but they can buy all but a handful of companies on the planet without even issuing a dime of debt or equity to do it.
No, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. They might not resemble their current form in 20 years but they're certainly going to be around for a long while.
Intersil, Micrel, Fairchild, IDT, Microsemi, Power Integrations will die to lack of enough integration to compete with TI, costs too high to compete with Asian suppliers.
Maxim and Analog Devices will merge or die, or merge and fail to integrate the cultures. On the other hand, the TI/Nat Semi merger was very well executed, so hopefully MaxADI will be a good competitor to TI "The Borg".
Atmel and Microchip will decline unless they completely scrap their 8-/16-bit stuff (which can't compete with the likes of Holtek, let alone no-name Chinese copies, on price for the volume markets) and accept that the future is ARM for emerging (14 to 24 year old) developers/hobbyists, and invest in same. That means a one-time major restructuring with massive layoffs, timed so the same financial year covers the kill stage and some good story at the end. Also, design last time buys carefully spread over years so as not to piss off the faithful engineers that design 'em in. Oh, and stop spending money on the discrete analog lines (MCHP particularly), but use the cores as value add to the ARM systems-on-a-chip. And no, the days of value-pricing those features are gone - the features win you the socket now, they don't get you the high margin.
You're only being a pedant if you're rubbing it in someone's face.
What you are doing is making sure that people's claims are accurate and that is a service to all involved in the discussion.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Ubuntu already ruined the UI and are going to be systemd-tards, so who cares what happens to them? Most of us have already moved on
It is a lot more than that. The electronics are simpler too.
Which companies will be around in 10 years? Companies that are in the business of acquiring, managing, and selling your data to others as well as selling other's data to you. The hardware and software do not matter. Those will always be there, of course, but the players will change as they have in the past. No one remembers Data General (a hardware manufacturer despite their name) or Amdahl or Compaq. For Microsoft, the success of their cloud services is the key to their survival. IBM, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Ebay...Yes. HP, Dell, Oracle, Sun...no.
For me the first two that come to mind... F-5 and Riverbed. F-5 has a few security suites and data mining services that haven't really caught hold, but the vast majority of their business is still load balancing. As SDN becomes more prevalent, much of that requirement will go away. Same goes for Riverbed, they have network and application performance monitors, but their core business is still WAN acceleration. With the combination of bandwidth becoming cheaper and less traffic being able to be optimized over the WAN (VDI is becoming much more prevalent and PCoIP doesn't do particularly well / video is becoming more of the percentage of the WAN utilization anyway / etc..) I could see them being in trouble.
Ten years can be a long time if you've got the cash and a "core business" to eek out existence on
Exactly right. Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc all have huge cash hordes and aren't going to disappear in the next 25 years because they can simply buy their way into another line of business if needed.
Apple's market will shrink rather than grow, primarily due to their failure to really innovate.
I think you are making the common mistake that most people make about Apple's pace of innovation. Apple only produces about 1-2 big innovations per decade. Their last big product introduction (the iPad) has only been around since 2010 and the iPhone only came out in 2007 and the iPod/iTunes was in 2001. It's going to take some time but I think ApplePay has the potential to be a huge product for Apple. It's certainly the most interesting thing they've done lately and nobody (even Google) has something quite as slick. I think the Apple watch is going to be DOA but maybe not. I just don't think they got the use case right on that one - I don't see what itch it scratches. Anyway the point is that Apple introduces a big product every 5-10 years and always has. If they haven't done anything of note by 2020 then we should start to wonder about what's going on.
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.)
What smart investments? I think Facebook has been wildly overpaying for some pretty speculative stuff. I think their VR investments are going to wither and die. Nobody is going to use Occulus VR headsets for business meetings. Ever. I was doing work in VR 15 years ago and it is the very definition of a niche market. The use cases are gaming and then what? There is a modest market in games but geeks are hugely overestimating it and frankly Facebook hugely over paid for Occulus in my opinion. I just don't see the use cases to justify the investment. I don't mind being wrong in this case but I just don't see the ROI. MAYBE if they have a breakthrough in augmented reality but Occulus isn't even really working on that right now.
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.
Complete nonsense. The PC isn't going anywhere. Tablets will eat some but not all of the market. There is no way in hell VR displays are going to do away with monitors. Augmented reality is still science fiction for the time being and even should it become practical it isn't going to replace the PC. The potential use cases for augmented reality products are quite different than for PCs.
Most likely, and the most obvious, least risk path is to not try to be revolutionary with it. You have a storage element. Use it as that - make your non-volatile memory out of it. I mean, flash memory has its uses, but also its limitations that limit its uses (like limited lifespan). Memristor doesn't have lifespan issues so why not use it as extremely fast storage media? We're hitting the limits of flash memory density vs. lifespan, so this technology can be immediately put to use to increase storage capacities and system performance in a traditional computer.
That's the way to proceed first - a revolutionary OS that uses memristors as "RAM" with persistence is innovative, but high risk and requires a lot of outside thinking. Replacing SSD storage with memristor instead of flash, not as risky and lets us explore the technology in the meantime. And yes, it'll disrupt industry because the traditional flash producers now have a product with a distinct disadvantage.
Far too often products failed because they failed to take in market inertia - be too different and people shun it because it's different. (Especially if they can't tell it's different because of bugs or different because of technology).
As the technology matures, the other applications will come out.
Their reason for existing. The long term survivors ofter have a 2nd, 3rd or more. MicroSoft had five: BASIC, DOS, Windows, Office and Xbox. Apple had Apple 2, Mac/laser-printing, iPod/iTunes, iPhone/apps, and iPad. Both those companies had plenty of failures along the way too. Google has Search, AdWords, YouTube and Android. They need more money-making ideas.
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.
The old Slashdot's still around. It's called SoylentNews now.
I remember reading about that HP initiative on /. a year or two ago, and the consensus was "vapor," but /. is very, very cynical. Regardless, I haven't heard a thing about it since. Is there any evidence it's not vapor?
A little while back HP did a big reveal on everything they've been working on, basically with the intention of getting other stakeholders involved. The impression I got was there is one or two roadblocks left, but couldn't be described as vapor. Worst case scenario is they'll cover their loses selling the tech on.
I think they'll probably be smaller, but they aren't "Agile" enough? Agile is not a real concept, it's just stupid business talk.
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You are complaining about a central feature of capitalism. Public companies chase profits and steeply discount the future. If they don't, the board is replaced with a new board that is willing to do that. You need major systemic change to change this.
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Do you mean that 75% of all semiconductor units sold go into tablet/smartphones? Or that 75% of the total semiconductor revenue is in this market? Intel's business is small volumes of high value silicon, so it's a big difference.
Except that's not true. You're referring to the contrapositive, but the contrapositive would be:
If 1) blue whales are not fluent in Swahili, then 2) this post was not written in Iceland and 3) this post was written in Iceland.
Applying the logic above: For it to be false that #2 and #3 follow from #1, there must exist at least one case where the #1 is true but #2 and #3 are not. Included in that requirement is therefore the requirement that there must be at least one case where the first requirement true.
So show me a swahili-speaking blue whale and I'll give your argument credence ;)
Also, saying "therefore the reasoning is invalid" - the reasoning above can be formalized using the standard rules of logic. Hence that would be arguing that logic itself is invalid ;)
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
This "feature" did not exist until the past 30 years. Before that it all works a lot better.
Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: “it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits.” Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it’s their company, but they’re legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that’s served them well. Maximize profits, or else.
If you think that is a good thing then you are what's wrong with the world.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The problem with rare earths isn't that they aren't here, it's that it's too expensive to mine them. (And I almost don't need to say where "here" is.) Various rare earths are widely distributed at low concentrations. And expensive to separate from each other. Active mines for rare earths, however, do tend to concentrate where costs of mining are low. Robot miners may address this problem. (The current approach tends towards open pit mines, but those are quite destructive.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Desktop users even those who know their way around bash and maybe setting up a DHCP, ssh server and some crap typically don't know how to deal with the init system anyway, be it sysv upstart or systemd. You can use fdisk, gparted, mkfs, sshfs, whatever (even delete the udev rules for network cards when swapping a network card makes you lose networking) without ever touching init scripts or knowing what the fuck they do. And sure, you can change the GUI or not install that particular GUI in the first place (many choices of .iso files with Ubuntu and Mint alone).
So for desktop use, why should we care so much? Ubuntu LTS or Mint (or Ubuntu point releases if you have the bandwith for upgrading every six monthes) can still work fine even if systemd is an abomination (I doubt bash, sed, grep, Firefox, VLC or even most desktop environments will end up depending on it)
It will be the distro's job to fix the obscure bugs so it doesn't crash, lock up, lose data and so on. It's not the linux user's job unless you're a professional sysadmin.
For now I rely on Ubuntu : 5 year support, hardware support, big software library (that is included in the base repositeries so it's all part of the 5 year deal)
I shall try PC-BSD 10.1 but would expect to lose / waste time (unless I upgrade hardware to make useful use of ZFS)
I'm going to be in a pub on New Year's Eve, and I don't drink alcohol. I'll be the guy for whom "if he's drinking, everybody's not only drinking but also composing epic poetry in Lojban".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The shareholders do run the company, indirectly. They elect the directors, who hire top management to run the company.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Excellent selection, since this is just what has been done, only even more general than that.
It;s a good question if any of us will be here. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one."
Red Hat will still be there; systemd is crap, but people who need to learn it. There is a man page. They got away with worse (selinux, their network script, pppd, etc). They have a steady income stream in Enterprise.
Oracle may not be; Motorola, Ericsson and Blackberry will all fade and shrink, or be bought over.
M$ will be smaller, but still probably there if they manage to do one thing without making a total mess of it. That is a tall order for them. Xiaomi may kick Samsung's ass but they will both probably survive. I see a fallout in newspapers, magazines, and reading matter generally as prople go vitrual.
Apple is a platform company, and always has been. The user experience is driven by software running on applicable hardware. Apple started as a hardware company, and has always focused on having a reliable platform. A Jobs snippet taken out of context doesn't mean much.
"Platform company"? I could live with that except that pretty much the only thing Apple actually makes (not designs - makes) themselves is software and almost everything that actually makes their products meaningfully different is software. They outsource ALL production of hardware and the hardware they produce is for all practical purposes identical to their competitors. Sure they put their little spin on it and the hardware is nice but it doesn't truly set them apart. If Apple started selling Macs with Windows preloaded or iPhones with Android preloaded, their ability command the margins they do would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Anything you outsource 100% is not core to your business if you plan on remaining in business for long.
And the Jobs quote wasn't out of context. The video speaks entirely for itself and I've seen the entire interview where he made that statement. Steve Jobs himself said quite plainly and without equivocation that Apple at its core is a software company. And in this case I pretty much agree with him. Whether you like Jobs or not he very clearly understood what made Apple successful and what set them apart from their competition. And the core of that differentiation is software.
On this, just about everyone will disagree. Their hardware is different, performs within published specs, and lasts better and longer than any competitor.
So good of you to speak for everyone. Fact is that the hardware in any mac made since they moved to Intel chips is not meaningfully different from PCs. The CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, memory and the rest are almost identical to similarly spec'd PCs. The cases are pretty and they do a better than average job supporting them (for the limited time they do support them) but the hardware demonstrably is not different. Their iDevices are slightly more customized but realistically aren't much different than their competition either. ARM CPUs, same memory, same glass, etc. Hell Apple even sued Samsung because according to Apple the hardware on devices Samsung was selling were barely distinguishable. Even at it's most extreme Apple's hardware is at most marginally different from that of their competitors.
If you want to claim that Macs or iDevices "last longer" you'll have to provide some actual evidence to support that assertion. I've seen no credible evidence to support your position.
And you knew this, so why do you state they're a software company?
Because the software is what differentiates their products. Software is near-as-makes-no-difference the only thing that Apple themselves makes that they do not outsource. They design some hardware but they don't make it - they don't even assemble it. A company is what it does. Apple makes software and then designs some pretty boxes out of mostly commodity hardware to sell it in which someone else makes and distributes. Apple is at its core a software company because that is where they make their money.
But it has been that for a lot longer than 30 years. Shareholders get to fire the board and time value of money calculations make it so you want your money ASAP. So they always go for short term profit. It is the economic law.
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Looks like they've more recently followed up with a "new OS" announcement for the machine called Linux++, which one would assume is a modified Linux. That's supposed to be the stopgap to Carbon their ground up new OS:
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
So still some movement, and 6 months is a bit better than "3 years" or whatever the standard it-will-never-happen date is for computing (for fusion it's 20 years apparently).
Sam
It took a hell of a long time for USB keyboards to be actually usable on x86 PCs. For the longest time, BIOS configuration and boot loader interaction was impossible, since the keyboard wouldn't be initialized until you hit the actual OS. Keyboards with built-in USB hubs were the worst.
Eat the rich.
Really? The first PC I owned with a USB port had options to emulate PS/2 mice and keyboards when a USB keyboard was connected. This made them useable in the FreeBSD stage one bootloader, which didn't know anything about USB (sticking a USB stack in 512 bytes is hard!). No OS support was needed, but then the OS also couldn't use any of the features of USB.
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