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Ars Technica Puts Twitter, Uber On '2018 Deathwatch' (arstechnica.com)
The editors of Ars Technica have compiled their annual list of "Companies, tech, and trends least likely to succeed in 2018... Let's grab a Juicero and take a moment to reflect on the utter dumpster fires that we've witnessed over the past 12 months." Some of its highlights:
Uber. "The company is losing billions of dollars a year, with no clear strategy for getting to profitability. Uber lost $2.8 billion in 2016 and will lose even more than that in 2017. Uber had $6.6 billion cash on hand in mid-2017 -- money that might not last much beyond the end of 2018... The company needs to find a way to stem its losses and get on the path to profitability before investors get frustrated and close their checkbooks..."
Twitter. "Still a money-losing concern. In 2016, it lost a mere $456.9 million, and its losses have continued in 2017 (though at a slightly less hemorrhagic pace). Still, on paper, the company is burning through the equivalent of a third of its cash on hand per year. And profitability (or an acquisition) is nowhere in sight..."
Net Neutrality. "It's not a company, but it's on deathwatch anyway..."
They also advise readers to "Pour out one for Radio Shack, which died even faster the second time around after what looked like a brave reboot" (though it's now getting another reboot). And they're bragging about their successful picks last year for the companies least likely to succeed in 2017.
"Yahoo has now been officially digested by Oath, a Verizon Company, its bits commingling with AOL's in a new, bizarrely named beast that for now bears the same logos... Yik Yak, the anonymous gossiping-messaging app that got banned by various universities for hate speech, is dead -- selling its intellectual property to Square, of all companies... Theranos is busy sending out thousands of refunds to Arizona residents, and the company has rented out its Palo Alto headquarters in an attempt to stay solvent until it can legally test blood again... BlackBerry doesn't make phones any more, having licensed its trademark and some of its tech to TCL. It is now a 'cybersecurity software and services company dedicated to securing the Enterprise of Things.'"
Twitter. "Still a money-losing concern. In 2016, it lost a mere $456.9 million, and its losses have continued in 2017 (though at a slightly less hemorrhagic pace). Still, on paper, the company is burning through the equivalent of a third of its cash on hand per year. And profitability (or an acquisition) is nowhere in sight..."
Net Neutrality. "It's not a company, but it's on deathwatch anyway..."
They also advise readers to "Pour out one for Radio Shack, which died even faster the second time around after what looked like a brave reboot" (though it's now getting another reboot). And they're bragging about their successful picks last year for the companies least likely to succeed in 2017.
"Yahoo has now been officially digested by Oath, a Verizon Company, its bits commingling with AOL's in a new, bizarrely named beast that for now bears the same logos... Yik Yak, the anonymous gossiping-messaging app that got banned by various universities for hate speech, is dead -- selling its intellectual property to Square, of all companies... Theranos is busy sending out thousands of refunds to Arizona residents, and the company has rented out its Palo Alto headquarters in an attempt to stay solvent until it can legally test blood again... BlackBerry doesn't make phones any more, having licensed its trademark and some of its tech to TCL. It is now a 'cybersecurity software and services company dedicated to securing the Enterprise of Things.'"
Twitter can't die fast enough.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Cash on hard means nothing. This is all fueled by VC money. What a dopey article.
Every time I read that I am completely disappointed that it didn't really explode.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Twitter employs 3500+ people, making that the right amount of dollars to lose at 120k plus per person. Assuming ad revenue covers hardware and utilities and cxo compensation.
I can't imagine why they need that many people. It boggles the mind.
Who cares what they think? Just like sports analysts, these idiots and others like them are wrong every year and there's no accountability for them being wrong. You're better off going to Vegas and putting it all on red than listening to what these turds predict.
The amount of hype around those means that when one goes down, it'll take a great deal of the over-inflated tech industry with it as investors get obvious evidence that 'tech' companies are not fundamentally different than 'non-tech' companies.
Whenever that happens, it'll be 2001 all over again.
This will have some interesting downstream effects on vendors. 2001 pretty much ultimately killed Sun. This time, I'd have my eye on AWS as the troubled vendor this time around (a lot of expense to support revenue that would evaporate all at once in a bubble burst).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ars forgot to include Conde Naste on their 'Deathwatch' list.
They can always charge more.
Not necessarily. At the moment, they are undercutting established local taxi and private hire business in a lot of places, but they can only do that thanks to a combination of escaping (perhaps temporarily) all kinds of regulations and employment laws that affect their competitors and having VC funding that means they can afford to price as a loss-leader (but again only for a finite amount of time).
If they start pushing prices up to try to cover the real running costs on a level playing field, they are naturally going to become as expensive or more expensive than local firms in many cases, and they are also going to be more vulnerable to less toxic competitors like Lyft.
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Twitter. "Still a money-losing concern. In 2016, it lost a mere $456.9 million, and its losses have continued in 2017 (though at a slightly less hemorrhagic pace). Still, on paper, the company is burning through the equivalent of a third of its cash on hand per year. And profitability (or an acquisition) is nowhere in sight..."
Kind of hard to make money when you're constantly changing the service to meet Silicon Valley whims.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
- HTC is doing better now that they sold their phone business to Google. We'll see if Google messes up like they did with Motorola.
- Uber will be fine. They'll IPO in 2020 at more than $20 Billion in valuation. That'll be a huge disappointment for Uber investors, but the world never has to go back to the taxi.
- Twitter will be like Yelp. Not a great business, but an ongoing one.
- Faraday and Karma and a bunch of other hyped electric car businesses will fail and get absorbed into Fiat or some other non-US car maker. But maybe not in 2018. Tesla will keep going.
- Gearbox has Borderlands 3 in 2018. It should be a huge success if they don't pull an EA and accidentally cut their own throats.
- Apple will prove critics wrong again by selling more iPhone X units than expected. Apple profitability will be helped by AirPod and Watch sales. New products in 2018 will be good. Critics will continue to be wrong.
- Cisco, Apple, Intel, Oracle, and Microsoft will all announce a special dividend for stockholders and huge stock buybacks, paid for by funds finally brought back from overseas.
- Slashdot will continue to be a politics and Internet-complaint site that occasionally mentions technology topics.
- Facebook use will see year over year usage declines in the US
- Silicon Valley culture will continue to be authoritarian as it relates to politically correctness. Calling people racist is the only marketable skill some people have.
- Red Dead Redemption 2 will be the biggest entertainment release of the year, bigger than any other game, book, movie, TV show, sporting event, or music release. It will be an amazing world. The story will be very good, but not as good as Red Dead Redemption.
seeing as most of their stories now contain 30% by volume of 'people reacting on twitter'. double bonus if the tweet came from ANY level of sleb
still front page news over xmas has included 'famous person's father dies' and 'cousin of famous person shot'.
With the maker movement, I could actually see Radio Shack working as an extension of local maker spaces. Or maker spaces in places that don't have them. It'd take some really bright management, though, and that's one thing it seems like Radio Shack hasn't had for a very long time.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
unless (or until) governments act against it for violating labor law. Uber has basically done an end run around 100 years of hard fought worker protections and rights. The economic value of that is hard to fathom. Take what every the 1% don't already own and you've got a rough approximation. So no, Uber isn't going away anytime soon. Not unless you can convince the working class they and the entire 'gig' economy is a threat.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I actually do not think...
See, you could have stopped right there.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Will Oath now spit out an owl pellet of teeth and bones?
Specially since no one really seems to understand what it entails. The current administration has been really successful in framing it as a free market issue; it is kinda sad to see everyone discussing along those terms.
Do you have a reliable source, not ones tainted by socialist America haters who regularly push fake news?
Businessinsider can hardly be called "socialist America haters".
But perhaps you are begging the question by classifying anything that reports what goes against what Trump says as "socialist America haters" and "fake news"?
I've noticed a real trend over the last year or so. Approximately once per day there is a dump of stories to Slashdot that have been on the front page of Ars Technica in the last day or so. It's almost like someone posts all the Ars stories to Slashdot as they're doing their daily reading.
Once day I'll do an analysis to determine if they're posted in reverse chronological order or not (i.e. from the top of the Ars front page).
Is spying on competing services really that expensive? They've got their app developed, their not-employees employees use their own cars... all Uber has to do is shuffle bits and collect a percentage. How are they still losing money??
Imagine the ripple effect through the economy if the bitcoin bubble bursts and Uber and Twitter go bye bye. This should rapidly erase any economic gains and might actually cause some real turmoil.
I'm thinking that pretty much nobody who's suddenly felt hipper-than-thou using the phrase "dumpster fire" has ever sat around a campfire, let alone seen an actual dumpster on fire.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Twitter can't die fast enough.
Amen, brother, but...
The article was much easier to read by looking for what wasn't there: NOTHING about the stock markets or share prices. Actually, there were implicit considerations of the capitalization of the deathwatch companies, but almost no explicit consideration of the financial situations. (There is a little bit in the Uber entry.)
The most vulnerable companies right now are the ones most exposed to burps in the stock prices. Considering how the electronic stock exchanges work these days, you can be sure that there are some burps coming. A useful deathwatch list would consider how much of a stock-price burp it would take to sink the threatened companies.
However the GIGANTIC threat is not a burp, but an actual crash caused by a bursting of the bubble that market caps are now living in. The stock prices have become completely divorced from realities and underlying values and even the companies' wildest dreams. The stock prices are just one computer's "opinion" that some other computer will offer a higher price for the shares. Each computer is programmed to think it's the smartest computer in the world. When has that ever failed!
Face it. Capitalism is deader than communism ever was. What we have now is corporate cancerism and stock prices are like taking the temperature of a tumor. The creed of corporate cancerism is quite simple: There is no Gawd but profit, and is Gawd's prophet. Too many prophets of fake profits are about to spoil the soup.
Pick ANY company. Estimate how volatile the stock price is and what could trigger a big drop. Then look to see who (and whose computer) is ready for the quickest leveraged buyout.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I mean, I thought the reason people use it convenience?
I live in a country and an area with functional public transportation (actually, it's sometimes considered the country with the best public transportation system in the world), so I usually use that.
The number of taxis I've taken in my life can be counted on two hands, probably.
And I never really found anything objectionable about them.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
* fired Pax Dickinson for social justice
* diagnosed Linus Torvalds with a mental disorder
* promotes communist nutjob Zoe Quinn's fraudulent Crash Override Network
* deleted comments that did not fit their party line
* promotes/cites communist nutjob Brianna Wu
* promoted the #ThankYouEllenPao campaign as soon as it began
* promotes Github's communist nutjob Corey Ehmke (Coraline Ada)
* was part of a smear campaign against Palmer Luckey
* is run by a friend of the Lerer brothers, the same group that runs Huffington Post and Buzzfeed
Business Insider is almost a canonical example of a fake news site run by socialist America-haters.
Not necessarily - as in London, the authorities can ban them (ok, pending review there), alternative apps can appear and next thing you know, Uber is out of cash, out of business.
>
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
I think it's an insightful comment, but you might be wrong. Maybe they will ride it out and find themselves in the best position to be the unbeatable self-driving taxi network, because they can replace their old service with the new driverless service gradually and seamlessly.
The reason why Neflix leads in streaming sales is because the used to be a disc-by-mail company that trained its subscriber base to transition to streaming. Yeah, at first the streamable selection was crap, but when it felt like a bonus service, everyone was happy. It increased Netflix subscriptions because it added value to an existing service, but it didn't need to be independently marketable from day one. Then the streaming part could grow naturally until it actually became independently marketable, all while sucking up all the oxygen of any potential competitors.
Uber are clearly trying to do the same thing. Their driverless cars will at first just supplement the human drivers. Any competitor that has to start driverless on day one of their service will just not have enough coverage to make the service as convenient as Uber will be. If you think the money will be in Y, and the companies that first do X will be in the best position to dominate Y once Y-businesses become possible, then it's actually pretty rational to do X for ten years and make nothing but losses.
Are they paying the drivers more than they collect from the riders? That would do it.
I hope next year Airbnb dies. They are destroying the lives of millions of locals in the cities where they operate. Whole neihbourhoods are transformed sleeping quarters for drunken tourists, making the lives of the people who live there a continuous hell. Please let Airbnb and the likes of them die a fast and fiery death.
-- Cheers!
I certainly don't claim to know the future. :-) So yes, maybe my idea will turn out to be wrong.
I don't see the Netflix-Uber analogy as a very strong one, though. Netflix always had a revenue generation model, and was reasonably successful for a considerable time with its original business model before transitioning to the online streaming where it makes its serious money today. In contrast, Uber is providing a commodity service in a competitive market and can't just increase prices, and its current prices don't appear to be financially viable without other factors helping. In short, its current business model is only sustainable as long as big investors keep pouring money in and/or governments and regulators keep allowing it to bend the rules.
Uber's real USP, IMHO, is that it has a strong brand that "works everywhere", instead of people having to look up the number for a local taxi firm in every city they visit and in some places take a risk on trusting those local taxis. That would dovetail nicely with the idea of driverless cars, and that shift in business model would presumably reduce its costs and risks in the long term. But without that, I just don't see that its position is defensible without some other fundamental change in its business model.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I mean....isn't their business essentially.
We hook you up with a ride, you pay us. We own no cars, we do no maintenance. We split the fee with the driver, taking a large chunk as a finder's fee. All we do is run a website/app.
I mean really, what are they doing that is losing them so much money?
I think there is a real chance that someone will seriously look at acquiring Twitter in 2018. It's not likely to be Facebook, Google or Apple, because of the prospect of a major antitrust fight with the FTC and DoJ. And it definitely will not be the Chinese companies that operate Sina Weibo and WeChat.
One possibility I've thought about personally is someone like Naver Corporation of South Korea, who runs the LINE messaging service that is very popular in eastern Asia.
So I wouldn't put them in the same category as Twitter for instance. They can always charge more. Yes, they've had about a zillion mis-steps, several times the quota even for a company in hypergrowth.
No, a lot of the advantage that Uber gets from breaking laws is the ability to charge less due to fewer overheads. They are not being 'disruptive' for the fun of it, it is a way of increasing profit.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I like been able to just step out of car when I reach my destination.
Yeah, that old-fashioned "taking five seconds to give the driver his money" thing is a real deal-breaker.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Twitter, is for TWITS.
I've never heard that one before! Happy new year!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it