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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."
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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!"
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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? :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.