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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."
No, because in part patent consolidation means the boogeymen in the garage have no hope in hell.
Come up with new and disruptive technologies? We'll buy you out as soon as you're on the radar.
Won't sell because you have visions of being the next big thing? We'll ensure our lawyers make it so you'll never see the light of day.
The tech industry has fundamentally changed. There IS no way a startup could do something which isn't covered under patents and other agreements between the big companies who have all mutually agreed to licensing deals.
Time was people started companies because they had a cool idea for a product, and wanted to start companies.
These days it's give the illusion of a cool product long enough to cash out and run like hell.
It's stable because it's becoming increasingly impossible to get into the game.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Totally wrong. Microsoft might fall in relevance some, but there is NOTHING to replace it in a corporate world.
Facebook has to be the most likely to fall the fastest, and Amazon the most likely to become something other than it is.
I completely agree here. There are so many things that can go wrong with the advertising model.
First and foremost, people are slowly developing a resistance to advertisements. Ads have gotten vastly more intrusive and hostile, on all dimensions (meaning you're likely to see an advertisement that wiggles [hostile by exploiting the neurons that detect movement, instead of offering a compelling sell], you're likely to see an advertisement that tries to make you feel bad [a mainstay of advertising is pretending you have a defect and convincing you they have a fix, we are seeing more extreme stuff on the psychological axis], you're likely to see an advertisement where there didn't used to be one [novelty from climbing on the "ubiquitous hostile noise" axis] ), but this can only really ramp so far. The attitude of "I'm not affected by ads" is false, but the AMOUNT that you are affected by ads is absolutely shrinking. There's a concern that advertising clients will in some cases realize this and, if enough do at the same time, crash the industry.
Remember, it is MUCH MORE LIKELY for advertising to crash suddenly than decrease in ANY OTHER WAY. Regardless of your view on whether ads will be profitable in the future or not, in the CASE where they are less profitable, the industry itself will be able to mask this for much longer than any other industry (because their job is literally making you believe shit). So if it DOES go down, traditional predictors may not apply until it is way too late.
Second, people are becoming hostile to advertisements in unusual numbers, and making efforts to avoid them. Every Netflix user is explicitly dodging ads with his wallet and time. If Netflix were to put ads in shit, they'd be in serious trouble, and they know it. Every Netflix tells content providers that they have other ways to make money, and reminds people that they don't have to spend their whole life being attacked by jackanapes. Adblocking will win the technical fight, and while users of adblock software (I recommend ublock origin, and I think we know what apk host engine guy recommends!) are small in number, it is becoming MUCH easier to help non-technical people use these products, and they are becoming more popular. Every person who watches ad-free shows and views the ad-free web is someone who is much less likely to want to see ads in the future.
It all sums to advertisers having to jump through higher and higher hoops for lower and lower returns. If you throw ANYTHING to jostle the house of cards- an economic downturn, a religion recruiting heavily, any of the many political orientations that are ad-hostile gaining adherents, a series of studies that show a shitty ROI on ads- you could see a massive crash.
And here's all these tech giants that are really just about ads ads ads ads ads. It's not a very diverse position at all.
> It's stable because it's becoming increasingly impossible to get into the game.
What made it impossible was that Microsoft was able to stomp on any threats. It could do so with vaporware, with buying the company, by using contracts and 'loyalty discounts', or by simply copying the idea (or the code) and implementing their own version.
Examples are:
Netscape - the 'free' IE strangled revenue (and killed Spyglass)
BeOS - extra discount if the OEM didn't install it.
Novell - 100 users could access a 10 user Novell server using MS Advanced server killing Novell's revenue.
Symbian/Maemo/Meego - MS paid a $billion a year to Nokia to kill those.
WebOS - MS had WOA (Windows on ARM) so HP would lose all 'loyalty' discounts if they used a competing OS.
Linux on Netbooks - OEMs would lose discounts on all products if they didn't put XP instead of Linux.
DR-DOS - AARD code in Windows killed that.
The result of this is that the only software able to survive was FOSS. It couldn't be bought by MS, it couldn't have its distribution channel killed.
The advertising apocalypse arrives, the value of internet ads drops to zero, and google's main revenue stream evaporates. Google goes on life support living off it's cash reserve for years while it goes casting around for a great new idea that never quite comes off. (See, Yahoo, SGI, etc.)