Farhad Manjoo, writing for the New York Times:
There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there’s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding.
And:
Tech people like to picture their industry as a roiling sea of disruption, in which every winner is vulnerable to surprise attack from some novel, as-yet-unimagined foe. “Someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us,” Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s executive chairman, is fond of saying.
And:
By just about every measure worth collecting, these five American consumer technology companies are getting larger, more entrenched in their own sectors, more powerful in new sectors and better insulated against surprising competition from upstarts.
Really interesting piece. I’d add Twitter to that list, perhaps as a minor 6th. It was not too long ago that IBM would have been tops on that list. Relevance can be fleeting, no matter how deeply walled the ecosystem.
Microsoft – a company that is rebounding… really??
“not too long ago IBM would have been tops on that list” What?! I’m 37 and have worked my entire career in technology and software development and I can’t remember a time when IBM was a driver of technology. They made some decent laptops and enterprise software everyone hated.
I know it’s a common refrain to point to IBM as a giant that waned but it’s been a common refrain for more than a decade. Let it go, MySpace would be a more apt comparison.
It’s interesting that IBM isn’t on that list. I’m not saying it should be. But it seems like every year IBM leads the pack in number of patents. Why doesn’t that translate into a position on this list?
Dave and I go back further than you, I guess. Maybe it’s been awhile, but your post kind of sounds like the kid who dismisses the importance of WW2 just because it was before his time. If you really work in tech, you should understand where IBM used to stand in that industry, and why people talk about their past dominance. MySpace is a lousy comparison. Their supposed dominance was brief. IBM’s was not. Apple’s famous 1984 commercial was aimed at IBM, and for a good reason.
IBM hasn’t had a consumer product since (really, before) it sold its laptop line to Lenovo. Possibly since iPod, certainly since iPhone, tech has been ALL about consumer. Rest is support sector.
Inventions ≠ innovations.
Yeah. I think I wasn’t reading that carefully about the “consumer” part. My bad. (I was about to try and weasel out of the mistake… but there’s no weaseling possible. I wasn’t thinking). Once upon a time, “PC” meant “IBM PC”. But it’s been a long time. I wonder at what point “PC” also stops connoting “Windows”.