It happened to Standard Oil, IBM, GE, RCA, Kodak, Sears, all of them.
The same failure happens to government agencies attempting central planned economies. Except that government agencies are never allowed to fail, and we all suffer.
Are we living in the same dimension?
That is to say, IBM and GE are still world-defining and -leading behemoths.
A company doesn't have to be a household name to be one of the foundations upon which the modern world depends on.
Mainframes are just machines some businesses have found it difficult to migrate away from, though they would very much like to. IBM is not the only company who manufactures them, by the way.
> GE is literally one of three major jet engine makers
That part of the GE conglomerate does well because it's floated by the defense industry and commercial aviation. In other words, it depends on government money.
> to say nothing of their more mundane businesses
I internally chuckle a bit when I see "GE Lighting, a Savant company."
> eg: household appliances
GE hasn't made household appliances, as opposed to putting their brand on junk made in China or someplace, in 30 or 40 years. They were the innovator in this space roughly around the time America put a man on the moon.
> foundations upon which the modern world depends
Whoa nellie.
“ two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos, which are using mainframes, according to data provided by IBM. Most of those machines come from IBM.”
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/04/the-venerable-mainframe-ro...
"Titan" by Ron Chernow
If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale.
Same for the likes of Nvidia.
The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.
Did they have unique advantages even in the bad times? To my mind, they still had the allegiance of the big companies, which can be pretty sticky.
As soon as the millions of niche use cases on the low end of the compute market get absorbed by ChromeOS or MacOS, which is not likely soon.
Ads will go to wherever they are most effective. Google to Facebook, then Tik Tok, etc.
Android - does anything about Android these days seem like it is a driving ambition for a company the scale of Google? And what does it contribute to their bottom line apart from ads via the platforms above that are eating themselves?
I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.
I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.
This entrenchment is what makes a company like Google fat and lazy and take their users for granted. Behaviour that we are seeing growing year by year. If they stop paying Apple to be the default in Safari (or the government says they can’t, or Apple just decides to kick them in the shins the way they did to Facebook with anti-tracking tech), users would go to whatever else became default. I.e. there is no sacred loyalty earned that would cause anyone to take actions to switch back.
FWIW, literally every non-tech person who I’ve switched to DDG has been happier with the results when I’ve asked them what they thought.
They are already, by accident. And a large amount of them doesn't even realize it's a different page...
I do think if it's it's less of a conversation topic outside of tech it's because people outside of tech are less reliant on internet search.
If anything I think people have an exaggeratedly poor view of Google's performance. I think it works pretty good, it's just that some of the ways it fails are confusing and frustrating. There's so much magic it's not entirely obvious why you're getting the results you are getting.
I also see a lot of older family members simply query Siri for 99% of what they are looking for.
I understand the logic behind Google's position. What's the logic in Nvidia being similar?
Nvidia makes graphics chips and they are a large portion of the market at around two-thirds, but it's not like AMD doesn't exist. While Nvidia is doing very well, Intel looked to have an unassailable position and then they had some bad years and AMD caught up and Apple moved to their own chips.
I'm not saying that Nvidia isn't a great company, but Intel was completely destroying all its competition for a long time and then found itself in a bad place it needed to recover from. Couldn't Nvidia find itself in the exact situation that Intel was in? Sure, it wouldn't be due to fabs, but it could be due to something else.
They definitely have way more bureaucratic than even a few years ago. Part of it is regulations and the cost of complying with increasingly complex legal matters. Also, compared to 5 years ago they have almost twice the employee count. That means they’re even more herding to do.
Yes, the underlying tech may be good, but if they spend extra time in meetings and complying with “extra” requirements that smaller companies can avoid, then they’re at a disadvantage. Especially since they’ve shared and open sourced or sold a lot of tech that makes them special (k8, grpc, protos, spanner, etc).
Even now the importance of the surface web, which is Google's bailiwick, is diminishing.
As long as we are talking about democracies that is not true. In every election that particular planned economy can be replaced by another planed economy or privatization.
But actually, the DoEd does things. If it’s growing in scope, then that “scope”… is a thing?
https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/marketcap/
Profit, profit margin, and number of employees has been in steady decline for many years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/profit-mar...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-...
The decline is especially meaningful for them because the field they used to compete in (tech) exploded over the last 15 years. It has long been turning into a body shop where you would not expect to see any advancement, surely not like the old days.