Meta’s Meltdown Shows How Big Tech’s Invincible Era Is Over

Your analysis seems pretty good to me though.

Hitachi, for instance, sold its HGST hard drive business to WD, but it also makes a lot of heavy-industry and defence equipment, including tanks, APCs, rolling-stock, lifts, and construction equipment. Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of CMOS sensors (almost every single smartphone uses a Sony sensor), and not even including its music, film, video game, camera, and smartphone divisions. Sure, they don’t make VAIO notebooks and Walkmans any more, but they almost certainly have a massive monopoly/duopoly over many of their other divisions.

It’s just survival of the fittest. You could’ve said the same thing about aeroplane companies throughout the ‘50s to ‘90s. Almost every other American company has been subsumed into Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the same goes for many other British companies that are now BAE Systems, and European companies that are now Airbus.

Not all of us thought it was unthinkable at the time.

Many of these companies made strategic mistakes that resulted in them being a shadow of their former selves.

Even though Unix was born on their hardware in the 70s, DEC never embraced it, preferring their VMS operating system instead. They eventually created Ultrix, their version of BSD Unix, but by then it was too late.

Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO basically said he didn’t see why anyone would need a computer at home [1] which obviously was incorrect. (He probably meant a minicomputer but still.)

DEC eventually came out with a line of PCs called the Rainbow but again, they missed the boat.

DEC was a chip foundry back then and an early ARM licensee; they created the StrongARM processor [2] that was used in one of Apple’s Newton MessagePads, which was quite a technological leap at the time compared to the Palm Pilot and Handspring. I owned a Palm at the time but the Newton was on another level.

Why was the StrongARM so good? Because DEC created Alpha, their own RISC processor and used what they learned to improve ARM. For the noobs, yes, their was an ARM-based mobile device made by Apple in the ‘90s that wasn’t commercially successful but it showed the way forward.

DEC sold its StrongARM IP and its chip fab to IBM to settle a lawsuit.

So DEC missed out on Unix, PCs and today’s dominant RISC processor because of some bad decisions; more likely, a lack of vision.

And let’s not forget that Intel was also an ARM licensee for a while, too. In an alternate universe, it’s Intel making ARM chips for Apple and not TSMC. It’s kinda ironic that Apple dropped Intel’s x86 processors for its own ARM-based processors, an architecture Intel once made.

HP famously passed on the Apple II, the computer that ignited the personal computer revolution, that its employee Steve Wozniak had worked on with his friend Steve Jobs.

It’s also ironic Apple, declared dead so many times during the 80’s and 90’s, ended up where it is today.

[1]: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_u...

LinkedIn on the other hand is just pride in a bottle. I doubt they'll change their strategy. If they try to appeal to other markets, they'll die just because their core premise is cv placement. That's it. Anything else won't work.