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?

[mwvdlee]

If you're afraid creating a new product will cannibalise your current market, some other company will create the product and cannibalise your market for you.

Re:Ten years?

[Rei]

Completely dying is one thing, but heading on a clear and irreversible decline, or transitioning from an innovation company to a company with a steady, roughly fixed income stream is a lot more common.

To be really vague about what's going to happen in the next 10 years:

--------------
There's going to be some out of left field killer apps for various platforms; out of left field new hardware; and especially combinations thereof. In some cases it will be established players that capitalize on the new must-haves, but in other case it'll be brand new players that rise from nothing to become giants. Many others on the sidelines who missed the trend will rush in and and try to snipe off market share. Few will be effective, at least in the short term.

A few new greedy bastards who we love to hate will take the stage. We'll cheer as some established names go down. We'll mourn the cases where a good product dies to an inferior one due to inferior marketing strategy, managerial incompetence, and/or scummy tactics on behalf of competitors.

And all the while we'll get lots of fun new toys that change our lives in ways from the subtle to the transformative. :)
--------------

Re:Ten years?

[gnasher719]

Very true...look at Apple and the bigger phone and smaller tablet....Samsung went to town on them....and they had to follow suite...

And now Samsung is in the shitters with revenue breaking down, profits absolutely breaking down, and having a very bad time competing against Apple at the high end and the Chinese manufacturers at the low end. It always goes up and down. At the moment, Apple is way up.

Re:Ten years?

[Frankie70]

nVidia founders seem to be ex-Sun and ex-AMD engineers. They seem to have no connection to SGI.

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]

This syndrome is covered in The Innovator's Dilemma, which reportedly was one of Steve Jobs' favorite books.

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)

Re:Ten years?

[Euler]

Kodak diversified into many areas. The problem is that they were always expecting the high profit margins in every product line. And they needed that due to the large R&D, worker benefits, big management, and quality control process that they tried to apply everywhere. Secondarily, they were always chasing the razor-blade model and that just doesn't work everywhere. I agree that led to some wasteful ventures like batteries and such. But in general, they preferred to sell off a company for one-time cash rather than try to operate it. For example: Carestream, Eastman chemical, Exelis, etc.

Many of these companies are able to expand in new directions. Formerly, they were constrained under the vertically-integrated structure within Kodak because they only focused on photographic products.

The good news is that many of the industries Kodak spun off are still employing people and operating in the same physical plant that Kodak built. In fact, many new food-processing operations have moved into former film-handling facilities due to the superb climate-controlled buildings that Kodak built up.

People here in Rochester have a lot of resentment that Kodak didn't pursue digital cameras sooner. But the plain fact is that there just isn't as much market to monetize even if they did beat out Sony, et al. for the camera market. Nevermind that even digital cameras have lost market to smartphones. Electronics are low-margin, especially if produced in the USA. Film was very high-margin and high-volume. If you are over 30 years old, you probably remember that using a few rolls of film a year was a big deal due to the cost. Now picture-taking is virtually free; only rarely do I pay money to print out a photo.

Re:Ten years?

[Nemyst]

The way I see it, Microsoft is at risk with their OS due to the shift away from traditional PCs. They have no presence there. Flip side, Office is still king, and I don't see a contender taking that away anytime soon. It's just fairly likely that their consumer audience is going to contract, leaving Office largely to businesses.

Re:Ten years?

[darkmeridian]

Microsoft is definitely going to be around in 10-20 years, if only because of the captive audience that is their enterprise customers. The large corporations made huge investments in training, customized software, and back-end support for Microsoft Windows, and Office. Heck, there's no real alternative to Outlook for businesses, and Excel/Powerpoint are industry standards at this point. Moving to another operation system or office suite will require back end changes, and retraining their IT staff and employees, and Microsoft has moved quickly to fix all the fuckups with Windows 8, which was a stupid attempt to grab up the consumer market for commodity products.

Enterprises are okay with paying the Microsoft tax because they are more concerned about long-term support. You can always find someone who can provide technical support for Microsoft server products, but it's harder for Linux.

In sum, Microsoft just needs to be "good enough" for its enterprise customers to stay with their solutions. Microsoft has been playing the "follow the follower" strategy that game theorists suggest that market leaders should be doingâ"when you have a large lead, you shouldn't innovate. Rather, you should let people with smaller market shares bear the burden of innovation, and when they succeed, you follow them. That's what has been called "embrace and extend" but you don't embrace dead ends. That's why you see Microsoft getting into business cloud solutions (Office 365) to compete with Google Apps.

Also, Microsoft will only get stronger as Intel's mobile processors get more powerful. You already have tablets running Windows 8. Within five years, you will see smartphones running full versions of Windows.

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

[Ambassador Kosh]

IBM is also doing some of the most cutting edge nanoresearch in the world. At the rate they are going they could end up as something like a major biotech company. Some of their work on nanotech antibiotics is amazing. They have also pioneered a huge amount of technology with graphene.

Re:IBM is dead

[PolygamousRanchKid]

IBM is like toenail fungus . . . it never really completely goes away.

They used to sell hardware . . . now they sell services.

In the future, the name IBM will still be around, but I don't know what they will be selling then.

They don't know yet either.

One of my predictions for 2015 is that IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty will get the golden parachute.

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:IBM is dead

[gweihir]

From what I have recently seen of IBM "consultants" they do not even have people left that can get basic IT engineering work right. I agree they are dead. Might still take more than 10 years for them to actually keel over though.

Re:IBM is dead

[Moof123]

Few big companies ever really completely go away. Either the name sticks around on top of another shell, or useful divisions are sold or spun off and live on.

Motorola is a good example. The name sticks around on top of a small group that bounces between owners and makes cell phones. ON Semiconductor is their old semiconductor division and appears to be stable and just motoring along. Much of the rest is long gone.

Can you say that Motorola died? Yes, and no. I expect that in 10 years IBM will be a similar story.

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

[pnutjam]

Peter, is that you? Are your TPS reports done?

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.

10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[msobkow]

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.

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.

Re:10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[CraigCruden]

I have to disagree with your analysis. Phone and tablet is more of a consumption device or a multi-media menu system, but it is not going to displace the computer - just give more options (computer is more of a work instrument - i.e. creation rather than consumption). The reduction of prices since I started using personal computers (my first one bought by my father was an IBM PC DOS 1.1 machine for $6,400 which included a 20% discount (2 floppy drive, electrohome cga monitor and a crappy dot matrix). Now with the lower prices, I have an iphone, tablet, and personal computer all for a fraction of the price. Each serves a purpose. I don't really want a device to try to be all things to all people and do nothing great. I do want my devices to work together seamlessly (cloud is the first step). I find a tablet works great for reading, some browsing and watching videos and maybe menu entry -- but it would kill me to have to sit in front of one trying work with it. I sit far enough away from the computer that having a touch interface is a hassle. You can make an operating system that is the same for all devices (if they are powerful enough) but the user interfaces should not all be the same since you don't use them all the same way. That is why Microsoft has had such problems with adoption with Windows 8. If I want lots of functionality and a large screen - I will use my computer -- not a tablet.

Re:10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[Rei]

The future of Apple depends entirely on one thing: trends.

Why is it that so many kids put "iPhone" on their Christmas list and not any sort of Android phone? It's because their friends all have one. It's cool. It's stylish. That's great for Apple, it's a captive market - iPhones could be a year's tech behind android for double the price, and they'll still continue to sell like hotcakes so long as they maintain that.

But trends change. How long can Apple maintain a position in the forefront on this? Beats me. But I doubt it's going to be forever. And if they ever lose the "trendy" edge to someone else, they're going to have to compete soley based on tech and price.

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:10 Years Can Be A Long Time

[Jason Levine]

Today's phone is more powerful than a computer was ten years ago. I can see a future where your "home computer" is just a docking station that you plug your phone/tablet into. Or, even better, you set your phone/tablet down on a table and the monitor, keyboard, and mouse auto-link to it and let you do work (or play games) using the keyboard/mouse/monitor all while your phone/tablet wirelessly charges.

IBM? 103 years and counting

[ihtoit]

They've only been around through two world wars.

Re:IBM? 103 years and counting

[darkmeridian]

IBM will stay around for a long, long time because they spend a ridiculous amount on research and development. I know this is an imperfect metric, but IBM has has been granted the most US patents for twenty straight years. These patents are good for over a billion dollars in licensing rights each year, and give IBM blanket immunity from patent infringement lawsuits from any practicing entity. IBM created technology as varied as excimer lasers used for LASIK surgeries, microprocessors used in the Playstation 3, XBox 360, and the Wii, bar codes, and Watson.

IBM has moved from mainframes to data analysis. Heck, IBM has announced deals with Apple to push into the enterprise and with Twitter to mine data. IBM will be around for a long, long time. Even if it suffers huge setbacks and missteps, its patent portfolio will keep it in the running for a long, long, time.

There's this story about IBM, the patent troll. A bunch of IBM dudes show up at Sun Microsystems claiming infringement of seven patents. After the IBM presentation, the Sun guys get up and explain in detail how these patents are all bullshit, and not infringed. The IBM dudes say, well, we have 10,000 patents. We can go back to our office and come back with seven patents that you do infringe. Sun had to write a check.

http://www.forbes.com/asap/200...

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.

Re:The future

[Junta]

they will continue to loose money for 2015

While I agree that IBM in general is not all they claim to be, they continue to be profitable. Just not as profitable as they historically were and not as much as investors and executives demand from the 'IBM' brand. They aren't losing money by any means, though they act in many ways like a company that is losing money.

those familiar with biginsights knows IBM is struggling big time

That is another interesting facet of IBM. They tend to have huge big-name initiatives that they expect to change and dominate the industry. Those things in the last decade have pretty much all flopped and been money losers, buoyed by profit from all sorts of boring places that are seemingly not worthy of IBM executive gushing.

IBM in general is an odd institution. On fronts that can be profitable, but must settle for a more modest margin, they have the strategy of trying to offload. Lenovo is mostly built upon their old, failing PC business and is now the global leader and modestly profitable. I expect the same thing of x86 servers. This seems highly inconsistent with their purchase of softlayer. They are trying to get into the ring with Amazon, a company notorious for operating on razor-thin to negative margins for the sake of market share. Surely they must realize that the IaaS business cannot bring about IBM-level margins so long as EC2 lives.

Dice Holding

[Yoda222]

Or maybe just the /. part.

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:Looking back ...

[Z00L00K]

"Since 1994, Tucows has provided simple, useful services that help people unlock the power of the Internet."

Their aim does not seem to become the greatest service of the internet, but a stable useful service without unnecessary bloat.

They must be doing something right otherwise they wouldn't have been around for 20+ years.

AI

[tmosley]

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.

Re:AI

[Warbothong]

I think AI advances will be important for the economy and our way of life, but the *existing* tech sector won't be too disrupted by it. (Weak) AI opens up new markets for tech companies, which will make many non-tech jobs obsolete and pump *lots* of cash into the tech sector.

Jobs which computers are already good at, ie. following an explicit list of instructions very quickly, will *not* be affected by AI, since an AI approach would take longer to train than just writing down a program, it would make more mistakes and it would be nowhere near as efficient.

Strong AI (Artificial General Intelligence) would definitely be more disruptive, but we're not going to see that in the next 10 years. If we treat Google as the "singularity moment" for weak AI (automatic data mining), I'd say we're currently at about 1910 in terms of strong AI. There are some interesting philosophical and theoretical arguments taking place, there are some interesting challenges and approaches proposed, there are some efforts to formalise these, but the whole endeavour still looks too broad and open-ended to implement. We need a Goedel to show us that there are limits, we need a Turing to show how a machine can reach that limit, we need a whole load of implementors to build those machines and we need armies of researchers to experiment with them. It took about 100 years to go from Hilbert's challenges to Google; I don't know how long it will take to go from Kurzweil's techno-rapture to a useful system.

Nintendo? 125 years and counting

[ledow]

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.

Re: Apple's comeback was obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Microsoft will be gone in 10.

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Microsoft will be gone in 10.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. They have 10 year support cycles on their products. By the time 10 years rolls around, they'll just be ending support for windows 8. In terms of sheer amount of machines...there are more machines running just windows xp right now than all of the apple products that have ever been sold since the company's founding.

Not agile enough? If that's your main qualification, most *nix systems should be dead and gone by now, and yet, somehow, we still have people running system V on old minicomputers.

Re:Apple's comeback was obvious

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

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.

Re:Ten years? A lifetime in tech!

[BoRegardless]

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.

Re:Ten years? A lifetime in tech!

[meta-monkey]

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?

Apple IS a software company

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Apple's comeback was obvious

[cheesybagel]

It is a lot more than that. The electronics are simpler too.

It's all about the data

[dtjohnson]

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.

most these companies had one big hit, then faded

[peter303]

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.

Owners of the company

[sjbe]

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.

Agile? Are you fucking kidding?

[bigsexyjoe]

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.