2016’s Business Winners and Losers | Hacker News Reader

2016’s Business Winners and Losers

swotnot.com

62 pointsjfdimark26 comments

It’s hard to read the tech news without coming across a Google-related story each day, and usually with a positive slant

the MacBook Pro was widely parodied

This reads more as a summarization of 2016 press sentiment than a rigorous analysis of whether companies are "winning or losing". How many Pixels did Google sell? How many MBPs did Apple sell?

There are actually plenty of references in there to publicly available numbers such as revenues, profit etc. and links to plenty of original data points, but for ease of reading I've mostly added them as links rather than lots of data.

That being said, I take your point there isn't data available to back everything up (as you'll know, companies are pretty selective about releasing some data points), and so I've leant more on press sentiment in those cases.

I think a better indicator would be year over year changes in sales- but you also have to figure product cycles into that.

It seems no one in the comments, even OP, seems to understand how this type of list works. It's not based on sales or a hard metric. It's just based on the zeitgeist, "the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history."

He is putting apple in the same category as twitter, yahoo and theranos. Really? At this point it is becoming cliche to predict the demise of Apple.

I would argue that theirs was not a stellar year, and imho their momentum stalled relative to other tech giants.

So hence they ended up in the 'losers' column.

Of course that doesn't mean they had quite as terrible year as some in the list...but for ease of reference it's a binary list rather than a gradient.

When I read an analysis paper, I find it more convincing if the dependant variable is continuous rather than binary. It's too easy to find spurious statistical "significance" otherwise. The heuristic holds up here as well.

Apple actually released products. The iPhone 7, Apple Watch, iPad Pro, Macbook, Macbook Pro [1]. Do note all these products have their own use cases and niches. Of these, iPad Pro is a new line, while Apple Watch is a stable iteration. IMO only the MBP was rather disappointing, and too expensive for what it delivered (I bought a 2015 MBP instead).

There was also a noticeable lack of product updates though; MBA, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro. That's two times Pro. Apple is losing on the top segment of laptops/workstations. They're doing rather well on handheld/portable devices.

The reason people say Apple is 'losing' is because they perceive the competition is catching up on high quality laptop/notebook design, as well as hybrid tablet/notebook. Wether that is true remains to be seen.

[1] http://buyersguide.macrumors.com

If you read technology pundits Apple has been predicted to be in demise for nearly every year after the 90s.

> At this point it is becoming cliche to predict the demise of Apple.

Well, if everyone's doing it then in a certain sense they _have_ lost a lot of their cachet, no?

Also, you don't remember the late 90s. I was a huge Apple fan back then, and those were some disheartening years. In retrospect, I rather wish I'd bought their stock back then …

Apple really was in trouble back then, though, so all the doom and gloom was justified. In 1997, they had $7 billion in revenue and lost about $1 billion. They now make more in profit per quarter than they had in revenue for all of 1997.

There are some signs that they may be headed for trouble eventually, but they're fairly minor, considering.

It's just like the 1990s, except instead of being nearly bankrupt, Apple is now one of the wealthiest companies in the world.

Nothing lasts forever. The moment Apple fails to excite people it is game over. And the apple fatigue is getting stranger.

Good list, makes sense actually. The come-back of Microsoft, and what they seem to have in store (MS Teams, Hololens) is particularly impressive.

Sad that there are either "winners" or "losers" and no "treading water" but I'm guessing if they aren't mentioned they are in the treading water space.

But the other challenge is what is captured here is not an object measurement instead it is "performance against expectations" which makes people like Apple a "loser" even though they shipped more product and made more money than Google a "winner."

The EVP of marketing at NetApp used to have a chart on their wall which had all of NetApp's competitors and an arrow next to it, which was their "path" and the path could be up, forward, or down. It had a similar feel. It is useful as a leading indicator of future challenges. And by that I mean that you can miss expectations one year and be fine, but miss for 2 or more years in a row, or regularly have a miss every few years, and its harder to be perceived as the leader.

Google is winner? What do they do now? I don't remember being excited about their product for a long time. 2008 if you exclude Android. Seriously. Gmail inbox partitioning was a good thing.

I would credit driverless car as a success of Google, imitated by many. They have failure too, fiber for example, and Google Plus. Microsoft had also the big failure of Nokia phones, the results are mixed actually.

I wouldn't give any credit to Google with regards to driver-less cars. Tesla actually has product and software out on the market and infrastructure to support their ambitions.

An highly relevent metric to include would be annual net return vs industry benchmarks. It directly describes the changes in investor sentiment about future profitability, rather than relying on subjective assessment of the average tone of press coverage. Change in revenue, gross and net profit are also informative metrics, directy measuring change in current market-share and profitability.

While not perfect, the 2016 stock return relative to that of other technology companies is a good baseline for assessing who was a winner and who was a loser. 2016 equity performance is an excellent indicator of how NEW information impacted the long term prospects of these companies relative to consensus expectations.

Based on Zeitgeist I'd say Palantir was a huge winner. Sadly, I feel the shift towards way more surveillance is only a matter of time in many European countries. All ethics aside, If I had to pick one company where all my money went it would be them.

No mention of AMD and Nvidia both of which have grown 3+x over 2016. It makes sense, they are the Levi Strauss' of deep learning (in that they are selling shovels during a gold rush).

This reads like a sports news flash.

Not sure if this is good or bad, just an observation.

The site itself is not much of a winner: the text is right there inside the HTML body but it's invisible unless JavaScript is turned on. What for?

Do you really browse without JS turned on? Seems like a hopeless cause now adays.

Many sites work. I don't disable js in the preferences, that would be really hopeless. I use noscript and enable the scripts that make enough of the site work. There are obvious tracking scripts that I never enable. It's interesting to see the amount of cruft attached to many sites just to track people.

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