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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.