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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

Motorola and now Nokia, the last of the previous era big wigs have fallen. 13 years ago Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson, Sun, Nortel were huge. Now they are all gone. Even HP, Dell are no longer leading. That is a really short time span for a company to be on top of the world and disappear. Is this the expected life span of a tech company?

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Motorola and now Nokia, the last of the previous era big wigs have fallen.

Actually, Nokia was slowly and steadily on a rebound in the markets where they were traditionally strong. E.g. market shares of Windows Phone in the five largest European economies has grown from 4.9% a year ago to 8.2% now [1]. That's almost half the marketshare of iOS (17.3%).

Most of those units were Nokia Lumias.

Sure, it's not where they were years ago percentage-wise, but the smartphone market has grown enormously since then, and WP is showing good growth (except in the US).

Source: http://www.nu.nl/tech/3565096/windows-phone-groeit-nieuwe-sm...

Are those WP's in the hands of customers or still in the sales chanel? I suspect the last, and i do not trust those numbers. It's MS after all. If you don't know what i mean with that last sentence then learn the "classics" first.

Btw, nu.nl is not a source, really not a source. Tweakers.net is also not a source, too biased (i know you didn't mention tweakers, just sayin').

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Are those WP's in the hands of customers or still in the sales chanel?

The report [1] speaks of sales and actually claims that 42% of the sales are actually coming from feature phone owners (who probably like the price point of the Lumia 520 and all). Retail channels are not feature phone owners ;).

Btw, nu.nl is not a source, really not a source.

Of course it's a source, but you can dispute its reliability. For a substantial part of the Dutch population it is reliable enough to read daily. And it's not as if they have an agenda here.

Tweakers.net is also not a source, too biased (i know you didn't mention tweakers, just sayin').

So, what's the point of dragging Tweakers.net into the discussion?

[1] http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/Global/News/Record-share-for...

Specialized hardware was always kind of a stopgap. Even now you can see networking companies facing the double threat of virtualized networking in software. Software is eating the world as Andreessen famously stated.

As to the life span of tech companies I think it will only get shorter. One thing I find interesting is that it's difficult for humans (including myself) to really internalize the overall effects of compounding interest. I read a comment the other day in which the author was joking about how they can't wait until 2023 when they get to look back and feel how they do now looking back at 2003. It doesn't always seem that the speed at which things are happening is increasing dramatically even if that's the case. The progress between 2003 until now will be completely overwhelmed just a few years from today.

We might not be enjoying that much growth in the next century (or we might, who knows).

http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/23/the-future-of-work-and-innova...

13 years ago was the dot-com bubble. What about Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Intel, Oracle?

IBM doesn't count because that company is almost as old as the invention of the computer itself.

IBM is actually older than the computer, it was founded in 1911. (Unless you count Babbage's machine.)

That's almost exactly what I wanted to write until I read the definition of his analytical engine on Wikipedia. Although IBM says they formed through a merger of three companies in 1911, it's origins started in the 1880s and I count that as the true beginning of IBM. Note that in 1911 the company was called CTR and they kept that name until 1924, so either way I don't think 1911 accurately reflects the founding year of IBM.

Nokia started in 1865 as a pulp mill and paper manufacturer.

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