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

Buy disruption

[plopez]

This is the age old pattern used by established monopolies or oligopolies. See the purchase of Lyft, investment in Uber, the purchase of Foxpro, how the oil and gas industry purchases wildcat operators as just a few examples. If you have a large amount of cash and are too large to innovate, buy the innovation before someone else does and threatens your business.

Nerver try to predict the future

[NotDrWho]

20 years ago, only two of those five companies even existed. And if you had asked the prognosticators back then who would still be on top 20 years later, you would have gotten a very different list.

Re:Nerver try to predict the future

[Dins]

Yep. TFS even says, "But for much of the last half-decade, most of these five giants have enjoyed a remarkable reprieve from the boogeymen in the garage." Half decade. 5 years. So the entire point is that because something has stayed somewhat stable for 5 years that's probably going to continue into the foreseeable future. In the tech industry, no less...

TFA is horribly near sighted.

Re:Nerver try to predict the future

[ranton]

This all depends on what their actual prediction is, which I don't think is very clear even after reading the article. All it really says is they will remain major players in the industry for the foreseeable future. It is so broad, unspecific (and useless) that it will almost certainly come to pass.

Very few companies of their size just go away. At worst one of them could be bought out by a rival, but I doubt their brand name would ever be discarded. If the prediction was that all 5 of these companies would be among the 10 most influential tech companies 20 years from now, that would be the kind of silly prediction you are referring to. But will some people still be employed by all five of these companies in 20 years? That prediction will probably pan out.

Stupid article is stupid

[the_skywise]

Yahoo will be king of search engines forevah!

AOL is indestructible!

Prodigy? Silicon Graphics? Sun?

Naaah, naah... These "frightful five" companies will be with us "forevah!"

Amazon I think may fall down a bit...

[HerculesMO]

I have friends who work and who have worked there.... the job climate is basically ridiculous. Lots of hours, the pay not as great as their neighbor in Seattle (Microsoft), the advancement not very good either. Not to mention, Amazon is basically falling down in the enterprise space. They have made a lot of gains with CIOs/CTOs who are infrastructure focused and have a mission to "cut costs," so they have companies like GE and the like moving over to use their IaaS, but their platform services are a joke.

Everything at AWS is rehashed open source that is made to fit into a 'cloud' world... nothing wrong with this of course, but most of the basis of their products never really was meant for humungously distributed systems. Microsoft on the other hand (love them or hate them), made a totally new stack for cloud and the development community is embracing it on the enterprise side. This is Amazon's game to lose, but given the way their storage is segregated, their platform is one-way (come to us, no migration path anywhere else!), and their costs are nothing to write home about (because everybody price matches the IaaS pricing now).... I dunno, it's not going to be great for them going into the future. Of course I could be wrong, but right now I think given their human resource problems, their platform issues, and their inability to focus on developers (since they cater more to the ITPro crowd with IaaS solutions), it doesn't look good long term for them.

Re:Facebook is already declining

[TWX]

Facebook appears to have gone a lot further than MySpace did in integrating itself into basic web services. As such it will be harder to dislodge even if its core end-user business ceases growing or even shrinks, as they'll be able to be come a metrics and ratings and data company.

That said, there's still no reason to assume that any given tech or Internet services company will always be around. Go back a few years and AOL and Yahoo were juggernauts. Go back before that and IBM was hot.

Companies live and die by the research and development or the design they do that turns into products. Cut off the R&D, eventually the company withers on the vine. Apple has experienced it when Jobs wasn't at the helm, and other tech companies have folded because they myopically assumed that whatever thing they'd done to make their name would continue to bring in revenue. Look at how long Palm hung-on to PalmOS. Palm could have been what the iPhone and the Android platform have become if they'd not stunted themselves. Granted, their various corporate masters over the years didn't help, but the end result is that they're gone despite having been quite innovative when their products debuted.

Unless there's an Advertising Crash...

[rockmuelle]

Google and Facebook make almost all of their money from advertising/consumer tracking related activities. Both would be very different companies of they had to rely on direct revenue sources.

Facebook could shift to a subscription model and probably do fine - I'm guessing at least 100M or so people will pay $5-10 a month to keep sharing photos with friends and family - FB works well to keep people connected. If they can't run their infrastructure and development on $500M-$1B a month, they already have bigger issues that will bring them down.

Google will have a harder time. They have nothing of value that could fund their operations beyond the ad/tracking services. A crash in the ad market would probably be the end for Google.

Amazon is probably fine for a long time. The web needs a storefront, Amazon provides it.

Apple can crash by ignoring user's needs. As a hardware company with a ton of money in the bank, it will take a while. But, Apple could lose market share quickly if another consumer computing trend emerges that cuts into their hardware business. See Blackberry for a recent example.

MS is too entrenched in the business/consumer world to go anywhere. Just like Oracle won't go anywhere for a long time.

Just my quick thoughts on the topic...

-Chris

LOL

[fluffernutter]

Bullshit. The more technology changes, the more the requirements of the user base change. Facebook is nothing more then entertainment, and it got a boost by it's correct calculation that people wouldn't mind being scanned and manipulated. There are many more services coming that will be real services changing the way we live and work, they just need the general public to come around to using technology first. I would even dare say that Facebook is an early gimmick that worked.

The thought that this is it.. that this is all that technology will ever do for us is such a bleak view. That would mean our very societies will not change which is totally incorrect.

Re:Facebook is already declining

[0100010001010011]

Facebook is 'pivoting'. They've taken over as the defacto 'forum' software for a large demographic. There are a lot of private invite only groups that people are on. It was just last year that they rolled out half assed threaded discussion. You can reply up to 1 level deep.

My wife was invited to one for her profession that's ~5000 MDs and she loves it. She's buried into it like I used to be to Slashdot. They have pretty good discussion and discourse despite Facebook's shitty "discussion" system.

Every time I try to move one of my groups to a forum or even Reddit it's a constant "But I'm already signed in with Facebook". If there was any way to describe how Facebook has embedded itself the online space it's like a cancer. It'll take years to cut out all the 'share on facebook' links and tracking hooks.

I would kill for a Facebook 2004 to come out. As a social network Facebook is absolutely terrible. As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad.

Re:Facebook is already declining

[microTodd]

As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad

I think this is where you hit it on the head, at least from a business perspective. Now I know there's a lot of Facebook haters ("You'll never catch ME on there!"). And hey, good for you. Seriously. But the bald truth right now is that facebook has like a billion users, so if you're in any sort of consumer-facing sector, if you're not leveraging Facebook in some way you're really missing the boat.