Peak Google, Apple and Facebook
xconomy.com
xconomy.com
"Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook
—generated most of the new ideas (at least the
mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum.
(If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into
the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks
well behind the other three.) "
On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.
Myspace was never ever a technology company and neither were many of the competing social networks like Friendster. Facebook just built a better product. Just like Google did.
Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up.
Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.
(Somewhat ironically, I think Google has consistently shown the highest level of daring and innovation, as seen from things like Project Loon and the things that could totally restructure a first-world society, like self-driving cars or Google Glass -- and yet, they have the highest peak to climb, as I don't think any piece of technology [besides maybe Wikipedia] changed the world quite as much as search.)
Personally find the blogger's writing and ideas a bit second-rate, reaching out to the giants (Fukiyama, Moore) yet making no case for a reason not to "panic". As for his call for FB and Google employees to "exodus" and bring about change - seems rather mad and deluded. The shape-shifters are the hungry ones like Karp and Spiegel, not the Apple desk-jockeys and Facebook inner-circle.
Firstly, Google has Glass, self driving cars, Google Fiber, Loon, and every single one of them has the potential to be the most significant thing of this century - though these are mentioned in the article, their potential is __highly__ underestimated. Its true some of them will (I prefer might) turn out to be duds, but definitely not all of them.
Secondly, all three companies make a conscious effort to be innovative. Sometimes they err on the side of innovation. And the smartest brains are still proud of working there. And until that changes, one can argue that with the recent deluge of startups that it has, they will continue to dominate.
And talking of AI, I guess almost all the leaders in the field are have a strong relationship with Google. Andrew NG, Sebastin Thrun, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil...
And there were more. Many more.
The company behind the Loon concept has been working on this for over a decade. http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Cont... Innovation on an existing idea, no doubt but
Basically we could be at "Peak Facebook", but to claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon's best days are behind them is at odds with reality.
;]
IMHO, Amazon is up there as an equal peer with G/A/F.
Edit: I agree with the rest of the article though. I expect (hope for?) more interesting things happening from small players, especially in non-USA markets.
Put a fingerprint scanner on every iPhone. Let people pay for things (or transfer money) with their phones instead of chip-and-pin bank cards.
They already have bank details linked to every Apple customer account, and they have enough cash to cover all capital requirements and insurance needs and fight lawsuits from protectionist rivals etc. People are wondering what apple are going to do with its money when the answer might be in money itself.
And AdSense was largely an acquihire of Applied Semantics.
And something like Facebook, with its artificially inflated value, cannot expand to advertise to everyone; it can only crash when its optimism runs out. He gets it right: it's only a place for sharing photos and links. We don't need Facebook for that, and we'll figure that out pretty soon.
You can understate it as much as you want but at the end of the day Facebook connects PEOPLE. Technology, whether it be Google, Facebook, or Apple, is about people and it seems to me you haven't figured that out yet.
Facebook, in the past year, has increased every single metric of success; whether it be the amount of money it makes, the number of advertisers on the site, the number of users on the site, or the level of engagement from all age ranges. Every single metric has increased in all countries.
If you're getting your data and information from sensationalist articles which get thousands of hits just for mentioning Facebook, then you should look elsewhere to form a more accurate assessment.