Established Players in Tech Industry Are Displaced By New Technologies and Companies Often When They Are Operating At Their Peak (learningbyshipping.com)

In a column, Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, cites various examples from the past to suggest that it is often when incumbents in technology space have established market dominance that new startups rise and displace them: While the tech incumbents are clearly generating massive revenue and profits, nearly all of this comes from products developed long ago. In fact, as we now know in hindsight, it is exactly when conventional wisdom conflates today's economic success with forward-looking product innovation that seeds are being planted for the next massive wave of innovation. Google was formed at time when the incumbents of AOL and even Yahoo were stronger than ever. Facebook came just after the dot com bubble burst. Even the reincarnation of Apple took place after the bubble burst with products being developed as the bubble peaked. And for what it is worth, the PC ecosystem, particularly Windows, was relatively "flat" mired in Windows Vista while Firefox dominated and Google Chrome was appeared (Windows 7 wouldn't come out for a year after Chrome). In the infrastructure space, the seeds were planted for both AWS and VMWare in the shadow of the dot com bubble. In an historical context it is highly likely that the next wave of innovation in new technologies and new companies will happen right under the noses of big companies operating at what the public markets think of as peak (earnings) potential.

Comments

I should probably also add

[rsilvergun]

that if you call yourself conservative but then support progressive policies, well, you're not conservative, are you? Similarly if you call yourself conservative but favor rolling back to the 1600s then, well, you're changes are so radical you're not really conservative anymore. One of the most conservative politicians in our time is, oddly, Hillary Clinton. She'd have left everything as it; at most tweaking things just a hair and only really doing that to maintain status quo elsewhere. It was one of the reasons folks hated her with a passion. There are very, very few 'real' conservatives. e.g. folks who don't want change. What I see mostly are people who want to make a better world (the Bernie Sanders crowd) and people who want to profit as much as they can from that world (the Donald Trump crowd). In the middle you've got Hillary Clinton and Mitt Rhomney.

Because healthcare is too complex

[rsilvergun]

to leave to the free market. It's not a twinkie. You can't shop around for a heart transplant. Also, if you need it you _need_ it. Meaning the person selling it to you has a ton of leverage. And no, it's not doctors selling it to you, it's the for profit insurance industry. Speaking of which, in what kind of healthy industry do you have a situation where the person selling you a product does everything it can to avoid delivering it? None, the answer is none.

We don't need a gov't take over of healthcare, but we do need a gov't take over to _pay_ for healthcare. Single payer is the only rational system that isn't just dog eat dog, winner take all.

Is anyone surprised?

[PCM2]

Court-declared monopolist declares that monopolies, in effect, do not exist, or are at least irrelevant. Stay tuned in the next half hour to hear prognostications about the color of the sky.