Which tech giants will still be around after 100 years?
economist.com
economist.com
Don't bother wasting your time reading it. You'll have wasted two minutes, learned nothing, and have even less respect for the Economist.
But short run is not 100 years. And yes, Facebook will care from day one about QC, think data center and investors willing to burn money to foster old school technology.
Will that change? Sure. Will FB do internal research with QCs? Maybe, once they've progressed past the vaporware state. (Sidenote - if we observe QC less, will development work better? ;)
But a working QC will not put FB out of business any time soon. The hardware is only a tiny piece of the puzzle of quantum computing. Algorithms for QC are rare, hard to develop, and the field is in its absolute infancy.
Is that the description of computer technology as of 1911?
On the other hand, I think we could put together a pretty august panel of experts on the topic of tech company success out of HR readers, and end up with no suitable conclusion, and ultimately do no better than this Economist article.
It's going to take a couple years to get out of that mindset and into the mobile mindset. It's a little bit silly to think that a company with a market cap of 199 B on a PE of 9 which is highly profitable cannot compete with a company worth 300 B on a PE of 15.
It's way too early to be calling the death of Microsoft, Windows might not be cool, but look around any office of an SMB. The idea that these companies are going to switch to Macs (or iPads) and retrain their entire staff is a little ludicrous.
Or, in the developing world, their near religious insistence that trade liberalization will solve damn near everything.
In what way was it sketchy? Was it just because you happen to disagree? I didn't agree with their endorsement of George Bush either, but I still think their argument for their stance was solid.
In the IT industry, incrementally developing your existing businesses will quickly lead to oblivion. IBM succeeded in the transition away from the mainframe business, and thus IBM can be seen as an example what all the companies in the industry need to do to stay afloat.
I did not find this article a waste of time. It reminds me of Thomas Kuhn's view on scientific revolutions. Most of the time people try to solve problems by using already known patterns. Every now and then somebody comes up with a completely new idea; the new idea allows its possessors to solve the problems orders of magnitude better (i.e. faster, cheaper, ...).
Assuming that the core priority is to maintain and optimise their core business to a certain point of stability, they can then look at branching out into other areas that present attractive opportunities.
Of course Google has developed a very specific method to encourage this kind of behaviour (80/20) and Amazon has yet again quite a different process, so it would be very interesting to see how Facebook will go about this in the next few years.
True, but staying relevant in the field is not an engineering problem, it is a managerial problem. Microsoft had (and still has) a lot of talented engineers, yet they missed out on some great opportunities because of poor managerial decisions. That's why in 2011 they are not as relevant as they were in the 90s.
Anyhow, it could well the world's greatest computer engineers, but I doubt even that will allow it to survive the shifting sands of both fashion and technology over the next hundred years. Its not that facebook is bad, just that I very much doubt it'll be plugged into the technology that my children use to communicate in high school, twenty to thirty years from now. It may be telepathy.
I realized this author had no clue when he/she explained that Microsoft isn't a safe bet while Facebook is. Um, last I checked MS had a $200 billion market cap. I don't think you can compare that to a website that has been in existence for 7 years and hasn't even shown profitability. I'd bet a week's pay that he/she hasn't ever used an Oracle product or could even explain how its database technology is used.
Apple has a good shot, but I think Dell is not going to be around. It just seems like the integrated model is going to last and Microsoft is going to do it own thing (ala XBox).
Google might have serious problems if something other than the web shows up and advertising is harder. I am really not convinced (despite the efforts of many) that the web is the endpoint.
Facebook has just as much chance of disappearing in 5 years as it does of being around in 100 year.
Google probably has a better chance than any of these companies of being around in 100 years, they are in the oldest industry of all time. Advertising. Plus they have shown they are willing to invest in new technologies to stay current, ala self driving cars.
Amazon has massive potential, but by no means are they guaranteed.
Apple, Google and Microsoft all have ridiculous piles of cash, provided they don't make any stupid big bets, all of these companies will easily be here for the next 100 years just on these cash piles alone.
That's right:
The two largest cell phone companies in the country are legacies of a monopoly attempting to reassert dominance in an era of little regulation. Do we really want to return to the days of Ma Bell...?
Chances are it's not an Intel CPU you're using in your smart phone, tablet, or game console.
"Please use Netscape Navigator and the Shockwave plug-in to see this site in its full majesty."
I'm curious what it will say in another 1300 years.
Of course, if you don't execute on your mission, dilute your franchise by buying tangentially related companies, gouge your customers, might turn out differently.
Are routers and network equipment going to be a commodity, or is a good platform going to keep providing a moat and competitive advantage?
When you look at it from that perspective, any of them could go through a downturn in the next 80+ years that leads to some hot new company just buying them outright.
What is nearly certain is that there will be major technological shifts in the next hundred years. What they are is impossible to say. But the less married a core business idea of a company is to the current technologies, the more likely they can make the jump to whatever comes first.
I wonder if the author would have said the same thing about Myspace 5 years ago. I bet he would have.
Hardware (Apple, Amazon) OS (Apple, Google) Cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple) Web services like email, maps, search (Google)
Facebook has a very large user base. Whoopee. But does that mean staying power? Nope. Just ask Myspace, Yahoo, and countless dot bomb companies. You need to invest in R&D, become a technology provider, and succeed in more than one market. Beyond social networking, what does Facebook have?
This is a horrible article, especially by the Economist's standards.