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Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that of the 5, Microsoft is still in the mix. Look back 10 years, or 20 years, and ask which companies you would have thought would also be present. MS may have made the list, but wouldn't a lot of others as well?

Apple is also surprising, but then again, that's what they were so good at. You expect someone to come out of nowhere, but MS just keeps on chugging when so many others failed out.

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Microsoft's scale and early dominance gives them incredible staying power. Apple, at this point, too. Huge companies have the money to coast by in mediocrity for years, and can simply buy assets to fill in gaps in their product line.

Don't have a chat app? Buy one. Don't have machine learning yet? Buy a couple of those too.

Even if a company like Google lost most of it's income overnight, it could coast for years on pure cash reserves. The amount of money these big tech behemoths have to work with is incredible. As long as they strike gold once or twice every several years, they'll be fine.

> Huge companies have the money to coast by in mediocrity for years, and can simply buy assets to fill in gaps in their product line.

True, though IBM may now have spent too long coasting by in mediocrity...

I don't know, Watson is actually one of the most publicly-recognized names in the AI game. If they leverage that correctly, there's a lot of opportunities there.

Especially since most people who want to use AI would view Google as a competitor because of the number of services it operates, and IBM is more likely to support someone's desire for on-premises solutions. (The on-site enterprise solutions Google had for search and Earth, for comparison, have been recently discontinued.)

Watson is actually the most heavily-advertized name in the AI game. It's invisible in IBM's financial results, which have now shown declines in turnover for 20 quarters in a row.

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