Tech's Big 5 -- Here to Stay? (nytimes.com)

schwit1 tips a piece at the NY Times about the most entrenched companies in consumer technology: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The article makes the case that these five have a such a strong grip on the modern tech industry that they're destined to stick around for the foreseeable future. From the article: Tech people like to picture their industry as a roiling sea of disruption, in which every winner is vulnerable to surprise attack from some novel, as-yet-unimagined foe. ... But for much of the last half-decade, most of these five giants have enjoyed a remarkable reprieve from the boogeymen in the garage. And you can bet on them continuing to win. So I’m coining them the Frightful Five. .... Though competition between the five remains fierce — and each year, a few of them seem up and a few down — it’s becoming harder to picture how any one of them, let alone two or three, may cede their growing clout in every aspect of American business and society. ... In various small and large ways, the Frightful Five are pushing into the news and entertainment industries; they’re making waves in health care and finance; they’re building cars, drones, robots and immersive virtual-reality worlds. Why do all this? Because their platforms — the users, the data, and all the money they generate — make these far-flung realms seem within their grasp."

Comments

Re:Facebook is already declining

[Penguinisto]

Lousy time to run out of mod points... this was damned good.

I would add though that it's never one factor that makes a company grow, die, or stay steady-state. R&D is one of the most important, but believe it or not, so is marketing, product design, and the state of competition.

We can continue using Palm as an example... the combination of stuff that killed it? Well...

1) As you said, R&D was stifled and stymied, even by its own management.

2) The larger market moved, and gained speed as it did. PDAs were being eclipsed for the same reason pagers were; phones began gaining features that obviated both of them (SMS killed the pager, while Blackberry slowly killed off the PDA. the iPhone was simply the coup d' gras.) To Palm's credit, PalmOS was one of the most-licensed OSes in the North American smartphone market pre-iPhone, but they failed to capitalize on it early/fast enough.

3) competition kept multiplying with no reprieve, with new competitors arriving that were backed by much larger corporations: BlackBerryOS, WinCE/WinMobile, Symbian, iOS, Android, etc etc etc. PalmOS

4) management dithered way too much, and leadership became rather dysfunctional and inward-looking (according to folks who worked there, anyway)

5) investments were grossly misspent, leaving Palm cash-poor at critical junctures.

6) Marketing was AWOL... the Palm brand was incredibly stale by the time smartphones became a thing outside of CxOs and salesmen. While PalmOS did very, very well in North America, its market share was barely above statistical noise in Europe and Asia.

There are a lot of other, smaller factors, but the idea stands - it's more than one thing that determines the fate of a company and its technology, eh? :)

Re:Amazon I think may fall down a bit...

[microTodd]

I guess you're modded up because you sound interesting, but really? I'm not trying to be insulting but do you know what you are talking about?

This article is a little old but AWS really is that far ahead of everyone else.

Plus, in terms of services and features, AWS is also ahead.

Now where Azure has benefit is if you're an MS shop and you want to just outsource your entire backoffice. But if you're developing....AWS has a lot more features than Azure, if you know what you're doing. No, you can't throw together a .NET wizard-based project, but if you're using an open source stack, or more of a LAMP-like MVC environment (python, rubyonrails, etc) then AWS throws so many tools for you to use (RDS, Dynamo, S3, etc) then its hard to see how you DON'T think AWS is a good environment for developers.

And what do you mean by "Platform Issues"?

And actually, all the enterprise developers I've worked with are looking more at AWS than Azure (not that I'm some sort of worldwide development expert or anything).