10 ms·
The scale of tech winners
- norswap 9y agoI'm not too convinced by the relevance of these groupings (GAFA vs Wintel). For one, Intel is a hardware company. And Microsoft seems to do well in a lot of key areas. Also, isn't Oracle on the same scale as the other that are mentioned?
- chinathrow 9y agoApple is also mostly a hardware company.
- empath75 9y agoAll four of them build hardware, to one degree or another and apple designs it’s own chipsets.
- skywhopper 9y agoApple is almost entirely a hardware company, revenue-wise. Microsoft is almost entirely a software company. Amazon is a retail (revenue-wise) and IaaS (profit-wise) company. Facebook and Google are advertising companies.
- skinnymuch 9y agoApple has been aiming for 20% of their revenue to be services. Though really they are mostly tied to their hardware. Much like Microsoft hardware, Surface, which is doing better than I was expecting, is there for their software like you state. And Google's successful ventures like Android and Chrome are there for keeping their data and advertising going.
- foobarchu 9y agoEven if they achieve that, they are still a hardware company, because those services are linked to the vendor lockin they've spent years cultivating. Nobody would use any of their services without the hardware, so they will always be a hardware company in the end.
- skinnymuch 9y agoYeah for sure.
- leggomylibro 9y agoYou could argue that Apple's software, or more specifically its design and user interface, is what really launched it out of the park. Online-connected keyboard phones did exist when the iPhone came out. So they make their money selling hardware, but who would buy that hardware if it weren't for the ecosystem? Their software is pretty shite now - major OSX upgrades have the stability of old Windows ones nowadays - but they still take their users' privacy and security seriously, and they have platform lock-in. Their hardware still isn't what REALLY makes them money.
- warrenm 9y agoApple is a media company that happens to sell phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, and desktop computers
- away2017throw 9y agoThe dude has interesting thoughts but hates MS and loves Apple to the point of blindness.
- lquist 9y agoAlso, why ignore the Chinese tech giants?
- virmundi 9y agoI'm curious if it's due to a) American-Anglo-Euro centric world view or b) Chinese tech giants are arms of the State, as such hard to compare since they are financed by an authoritarian government.
- skinnymuch 9y agoOracle should have been mentioned. Author certainly seems to have a bias. Can't say he was trying to look at consumer facing companies since Intel never was really that way close to as much as the other five. Oracle probably should've been included.
- mathattack 9y agoI agree. Comparing 4 to 2 survivors to 1 survivor isn't a great comparison. I still think the end conclusion is valid though. As computation and connectivity take a bigger place in the economy, the value of the winners grows.
- warrenm 9y ago"Wintel" was more-or-less the only game in town for 15-20 years And IBM has been around a long time ... it's just they're no longer the only game in town (though I'm a little surprises HP/HPE/MicroFocus/DXC wasn't in there)
- narkie 9y agoI'm glad others picked up the lack of Oracle here. I am guessing by 'leading' the writer means leading household brands in the tech industry.
- bni 9y agoAlso shouldn't Sun have been included, even at the height of Wintel Sun must have made some sort of financial impact, with Sparc servers and J2EE
- dmarlow 9y ago"three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined" I would think profits are a more reasonable metric for the overall comparison. Amazon alone has a huge disparity between revenue and profits.
- nostrademons 9y agoDepends what you're measuring. Shareholders (ultimately) care about profits, but if you're a pundit trying to predict the impact of technology on human populations (as Ben Evans ultimately is, though he works for a shareholder), revenues is a more relevant metric. It shows "how many dollars flow through a company", rather than "how many dollars does the company get to keep"; the former is a metric for how much impact the company has, while the latter is a metric for how efficiently it generates that impact.
- maneesh 9y agoExactly. To dive one more dimension in, if a company is extremely profitable, that is typically a sign that the company doesn't know how to deploy their capital towards growth. High profits are often a sign of stagnation in a corporation.
- adventured 9y agoNot to mention it's absurd to include Amazon's $100 billion in retail business in the calculation. How do Dell and HP (among others) get left out of Wintel? As others have noted, it's an article stacked to fake a point. And why are they comparing a Microsoft-Intel partnership against GAFA, which is the exact opposite of a partnership. It should be some combination of: Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, HP, Dell from the year 2000.
- Rexxar 9y agoIMHO, "Value added" is the best (but far from perfect) way to compare the real size/power of different companies in different markets.
- CalChris 9y agoThe article is about companies. But for startup employees, I've always thought of baseball: foul layoff. strike getting fired. strikeout your at bat, for whatever reason, is over. single AKA a job. double a well paying, secure, somewhat prestigious job with a decent stock option payout, a house. triple early employee and financial security. home run 8+ figures after taxes. grand slam billionaire unicorn founder, successful exit.
- empath75 9y agoI think this can mostly be expected due to the size of the markets these companies are playing in— it’s much easier to build a truly global business than in the past— as well as the increasing size of the economy in general. Just due to a power law distribution, the big winners are all going to be bigger than ever. The largest should be twice as large as the second largest, and three times as large as the third largest and so on.
- HocusPocusLocus 9y agoMeanwhile the number of homeless grow. It's like two separate worlds.
- drharby 9y agoRelevancy to OP?
- cyberpunk0 9y agoWhat do you think happens to people due to gentrification brought on by these companies?
- adventured 9y agoGentrification didn't cause the vast expansion of homelessness in the 1970s and it didn't cause it in the last decade either. They were both caused by the same things. 1) a terrible healthcare system that neglects mental health problems and 2) zero income growth for 40 years due to massive dollar debasement over that time, which has eaten the poor alive (the rich can hedge a 80% decline in the value of the dollar since 1970, the poor cannot). The great recession - courtesy of the Fed's intentional asset bubble party - and the Bush dollar debasement (war, out of control spending & deficits), gave us the increase in poverty since 2006.
- bdastous 9y agoYou mean the gentrification brought on by restrictive municipal zoning laws?
- erik_seaberg 9y agoPalo Alto has 67,000 people. Mountain View has 78,000. Sunnyvale has 150,000. San Francisco has 860,000 and San Jose is over a million. These companies are barely big enough to nudge the median income at all. Housing prices are being bid up, but it's not by residents.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rdlecler1 9y ago>”There probably won’t be a technology that has 10x greater scale than smartphones, as mobile was 10x bigger than PCs and PCs were bigger than mainframes, simply because 5bn people will have smartphones and that’s all the (adult) people.” Well written. Although I’d argue that IoT + AI will be 10x bigger (and more). Yes, there are finitite humans, but for every human we could have hundreds, even thousands, of devices. At some point those won’t be consumer devices, they’ll mostly be D2D. We’ll be analyzing the macro market and building new devices that can partake in this new market and we may not always understand the emergent behavior. At some point we’ll start evolving these devices so that they’re as individual as you or I, even with the same hardware. For the first 10,000 years technology was an incredible uphill climb, we’re now hitting an inflection point where it’s fast ice all the way down.
- austenallred 9y ago10x bigger than 5B people?
- skinnymuch 9y agoCould be. We are counting smartphones for 5B people a bit loosely in terms of how they're used. A sizeable number are cheap Android devices or iPhones that are five generations old. Many people don't treat their smartphone similar to how you might expect a lot of young people in a metro area. If you get a bit loose with IoT and automation and AI, a multiplier of 5B could be possible.
- thatcat 9y agoThere will be material supply limits at some point in all this scaling.
- austenallred 9y agoNot to mention population limits...
- njarboe 9y agoTrue, but (the mass of all human created objects)/(mass of the solid bits in the solar system) is still very small.
- pkaye 9y agoIsn't Apple a big tech company of the past even though they are quite successful at this time?
- muzani 9y agoIs this adjusted for inflation? It warps the data quite a bit if it isn't.
- elgenie 9y agoDid you look at the graph? "Annual revenue ($bn, real)"
- bhalperin 9y ago"The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market"
- d--b 9y agoIt's not really a fair comparison. Apple is the only one that compares to wintel. Amazon should be compared to Walmart, Google and Facebook to media companies like TimeWarner. Perhaps Gafa is not 10x bigger than wintel + tw + Walmart
- warrenm 9y agoAmazon competes with Walmart for selling crap But they're also a hardware company (Kindle, Fire, etc) And a media company (Prime Video, etc) And a logistics company And a *aaS company
- hueving 9y ago>”There probably won’t be a technology that has 10x greater scale than smartphones, as mobile was 10x bigger than PCs and PCs were bigger than mainframes, simply because 5bn people will have smartphones and that’s all the (adult) people.” Why is the presumption that the next technology is limited by the number of humans? I buy food nearly every day so the multiplicative factor is 300x myself in that regard. A technology that significantly changes everything can easily move the entire economy to the point where everything depends on it and everyone is buying it every day (think electricity).
- coolkomal 9y agoLooks like more people are supporting this argument in the media. https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/22/ask-not-for-whom-the-deadpool-tolls/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/22/ask-not-for-whom-the-deadp...
- warrenm 9y ago>in the past, tech companies always talked about buying premium TV shows but didn’t actually have the cash, but now it’s part of the marketing budget