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Ars Technica's 2019 'Deathwatch' List Includes Essential and 'Facebook Management' (arstechnica.com)
The editors of Ars Technica have announced their annual "Deathwatch" list, identifying "companies, tech, and trends least likely to succeed in 2019." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The past year has been an absolute freefall for Essential.... The market was ultimately not impressed with the Essential phone, and the fire sales started almost immediately. Only two months after launch, the phone got a permanent $200 price drop, to $499. November saw deals as low as $399. Eventually, the $700 phone was discounted all the way down to $224, thanks to a mix of poor sales and a lack of consumer confidence in the company. A poorly selling phone was one thing, but things really started to look bad for Essential in May, when it was announced the company had cancelled the second generation Essential Phone. The first device took such a toll on the company that it was considering selling itself, and suddenly the future of Essential was in doubt.
While the phone was dead, in May the company said it was focusing on an upcoming smart home product and operating system. But by October, it announced that it was cutting 30 percent of its staff, and the company was pivoting away from smart home products and would try building a phone again. It will re-sell you a missing headphone jack, though. Essential's next phone -- if the company lasts that long -- is supposedly "an AI Phone That Texts People for You" according to Bloomberg. That sounds awful. On top of all that, Essential's CEO and founder Rubin has been the subject of a major sexual misconduct controversy at Google.
They also write that 2019 "is going to probably determine whether Facebook's management team will continue as it is -- or whether there's a stockholder rebellion, or a government lawsuit, or some combination of both that drives CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others out."
Also on their "Deathwatch" list are Snap, and Verizon's "AOL/Yahoo Frankenstein" -- but not Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. "As much as we'd love to plop Goop on the 2019 Deathwatch, it is still just on our Deathwatch wish list. Goop is, in fact, thriving."
While the phone was dead, in May the company said it was focusing on an upcoming smart home product and operating system. But by October, it announced that it was cutting 30 percent of its staff, and the company was pivoting away from smart home products and would try building a phone again. It will re-sell you a missing headphone jack, though. Essential's next phone -- if the company lasts that long -- is supposedly "an AI Phone That Texts People for You" according to Bloomberg. That sounds awful. On top of all that, Essential's CEO and founder Rubin has been the subject of a major sexual misconduct controversy at Google.
They also write that 2019 "is going to probably determine whether Facebook's management team will continue as it is -- or whether there's a stockholder rebellion, or a government lawsuit, or some combination of both that drives CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others out."
Also on their "Deathwatch" list are Snap, and Verizon's "AOL/Yahoo Frankenstein" -- but not Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. "As much as we'd love to plop Goop on the 2019 Deathwatch, it is still just on our Deathwatch wish list. Goop is, in fact, thriving."
Essential should market their phone as a vaccine-dispelling device with a yoni healing aura, and it will surely sell like hot cakes.
1) Tim Cook as Apple CEO
2) Windows 10, or at least its update cycle
3) Elon Musk as Tesla CEO
4) MoviePass
5) Smartphones without notches
6) APK spam on Slashdot
Wish list:
1) Ajit Pai as FCC chairman
2) Systemd
It was an interesting and enjoyable story, but the thing that seemed to be missing was missed picks, as in "Who died without getting listed?", "Which major companies went bust without making the list?", or even "What was the largest collapse that should have been picked?" Focusing on the near-death cases seems relatively easy (at least in terms of the mostly obvious candidates they discussed), but I feel like there might be more to learn from a few postmortems of overlooked failures.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What people can't even figure out how they want to live for themselves anymore ?
We may be done for as a species.
I'v never heard of it before so I googled.
It's a reasonable spec android phone. The one vaguely attractive aspect is a claim of rapid release of updates, sadly not a promise of just security updates for significantly risky vulnerabilities, just fast updates which might mean rapidly implementing things like google not allowing call recording any more.
It has magnetically attached accessories. I don't want the magnetic strips on my train tickets and payment cards erased when I shove them in my pocket with my phone in a rush. A headphone jack requires a $149 centimetre thick extra thing on the back of the phone
It has an extra camera for black and white photos. An add-on 3D camera is sold for $49.
I don't care in the slightest if they go out of business.
So how good is their track record?
Final tally:
.500. Not exactly stellar.
7 correct
3 premature by one year, one obvious (Radio Shack, Yahoo, Theranos)
9 wrong
4 unknown (Gearbox, Uber, Faraday Future, SoundCloud)
So they're batting around
WTF? Your UID is lower than mine, you should know that all good slashdotters don't RTFS, let alone RTFA...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I got a kick out of how you used that baseball analogy for this. Batting .500 would in fact be almost god like in modern baseball. Even .400 isn't really considered attainable anymore.
This doesn't invalidate what you're actually getting at of course, it just means your analogy is terrible.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.