5 ms·

Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook will all go away within 50 years, says author

49 points by aaronkchsu 9y ago

xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago
I would think google can last because they do a lot of infrastructure as well. These are not things that stand or fall by current (marketing) trends. At least not directly. Amazon is atm heavily moving towards infrastructure based business as well like AWS or drone delivery services. Apple has the money I feel like to brute force themselves into markets, but as a brand it's already changing away from the "Steve Jobs factor". This can go both ways. Facebook for me is the most likely. While no social media before it has ever been as big or influential, these things do heavily fall or stand by culture. IRC to MSN Messenger to Forums and such have faded away considerably. To not expect similar would be to argue against human nature's tendency to evolve and move on. Especially the social stuff. Again they as well have been steering away to more "safer" markets for a while now, which seems wise. They equally posses resources to potentially force themselves into future fast growing markets that does not come from their own turf.
659087 9y ago
Not if we keep letting them acquire every potential competitor.
samsonradu 9y ago
Disagree with the author’s point of view on Netflix. I think it is quite a fragile business, with no monopoly whatsoever. I’m not much of a movie/series consumer though so might be biased about it.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  I agree with you on Netflix. 5th horsemen candidates on my short list: Microsoft and SoftBank. Tesla if they can stop burning money and cut out the hype? Verizon as a long stretch.
  - oblio 9y ago
    Microsoft was founded in 1975, 42 years ago. People underrate them, but I'd say they're quite resilient. And now they're the #2 player in the cloud segment, so they should cover for their Windows cash cow just fine :)
    - ci5er 9y ago
      Is Windows an ex-cash-cow?
      - oblio 9y ago
        I edited that part and now removed it since I was partly joking.
- larrik 9y ago
  I don't know, they have their own high quality content, and their TV back catalog is good. I would think they have a brighter future than many television companies, especially ones like HBO/Showtime and other special subscription companies. That said, they have less of a safety net than the others, with no cable deals to fall back on (which are steadily eroding from underneath the others anyway). However, they seem to be very good at knowing how to run their business, so I wouldn't count them out unless some outside forces take effect. Their name has been synonymous with streaming for a decade, which will keep them entrenched at least a while longer than they would otherwise deserve. I think if they had a serious stumble, Amazon would just buy them anyway.
  - mholmes680 9y ago
    i think if they stumbled, google would be the buyer. or maybe microsoft. amazon already built their version of netflix, the only thing they would need to acquire is the original content, and consumers seem to be so fickle over content anyways a licensing deal with the real buyer would be better business strategy. (probably).
  - AJ007 9y ago
    I’m not sure how long they get to keep their back catalog. Has anything been licensed indefinitely? Their business is certainly going to only continue to increase in competitiveness for the foreseeable future. My primary concern, from Netflix’s view, would be Amazon being comfortable buying video content at a loss forever.
    - zck 9y ago
      > I’m not sure how long they get to keep their back catalog. Has anything been licensed indefinitely? At a minimum, they have their original series^1. I would assume that, as part of paying for the various shows to be created, Netflix has rights forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...
      - 9y ago
- twblalock 9y ago
  I think the streaming movie/TV market is the same as any other commoditized market -- the businesses that survive need to find a way to differentiate themselves or offer something nobody else does. I think the original content is what will keep Netflix alive in the long run. There are a lot of other places to see movies and TV shows, but you can only see Netflix original content on Netflix (unless you pirate it).
trts 9y ago
I was thinking about how cumbersome it would be to change phone platforms if I got tired of iPhone or Android, and then how much effort I wouldn't want to spend if my Amazon device controlled all the lights, TV, audio, and temperature in my house.
- ksk 9y ago
  I think more than the individual effort of changing systems, its the network effect that keeps people tied down. A new platform or service could disrupt that easily. What if you didn't need to carry a phone (VR/AR/?), or what if all homes came with those systems built in.
cobookman 9y ago
Apple has enough cash on hand that they'll be able to make 0 profit for the next 50 years and still be around.
- romeoEtJoliet 9y ago
  It's true that Apple has mountains of cash, but in all likelihood, a failing Apple-sized tech giant would end up acquired by an adjacent company (see Motorola or Yahoo or Sun Microsystems ) before they ran out of money.
- ksk 9y ago
  Not really. If they decide to screw over the shareholders like that, they won't take it lying down. Cook will be out ASAP.
  - cobookman 9y ago
    Fair enough.
- tristanj 9y ago
  Only if they stop giving it back to their shareholders. Since they started their buyback program in 2012 Apple has 'returned' over $222 billion to shareholders [0]. Presently they are issuing debt to finance the buybacks & dividends. If they are not careful they may end up like IBM. [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/05/apple-5b-bond-sale-funding-buybacks-dividends/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/05/apple-5b-bond-sale-fund...
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    That debt is borrowed against offshore holdings that they plan to repatriate when the tax conditions are more favorable.
CodeSheikh 9y ago
The reason there never will be a "fifth" horseman is because these four giant fishes keep devouring the little ones (startup acquisition/acqui-hire). Just because things happened in past a certain way, that does not necessarily mean those events can always be used as a predictability model for future. Stock market is at all time time. Are we headed towards crash? Maybe not. Maybe this is the time where we are setting new standards. Yes, all these four have slowed down their momentum of innovation. But that innovation also goes hand-in-hand with general intelligence and thirst for innovation from the general public. I hope to see one them entering into consumer health monitoring and diagnostics, beyond heart BPM or steps counting. I will give them another decade before I give up on them. I hope the author made some good bucks towards the end. He raised a good debate.
- greedo 9y ago
  Who's to say the next horseman won't resist the advances from the big Four? Zuckerberg retained control for a long time, and it's not inconceivable that the Next Big Thing won't get acquihired.
  - mholmes680 9y ago
    everything has a price, no? especially a public company with shareholder voting rights...
    - uiri 9y ago
      I think Snapchat is a good example. The founder(s) still have a controlling interest in the company (or they did up until the IPO, at least). They want to build a company rather than sell it off. That's why they IPO'd, for instance.
bhauer 9y ago
Aside from a few exceptions, I don't wish death on any big companies. I would nevertheless like to see each of the named company's dominance reduced substantially if only to see what the alternatives look like once afforded some breathing room. As much as network effects are an inevitable part of the human condition, I rail against the behavior as the very small market actor I am. In my day-to-day market activities, I regularly seek out less-dominant vendors and service providers. Of the named companies, I am most comfortable with Amazon. Most interactions I have with Amazon yield a tangible service predicated on me being the customer. While some alternatives provide better browsing and discovery, there are few online shopping sites that provide the convenience and immediacy of Amazon. Apple would presumably also treat me as the customer, but I don't like the design of their devices or software and there are good alternatives. As a non-customer, Apple's existence doesn't offend me, but I do find them tedious and the amount of media attention they capture can be exhausting. Facebook and Google don't have business models that permit them to consistently treat me as the customer, so I do what I can to avoid their services. What services they do provide (for "free") are of low value to me. I can interact with friends on a wide array of communication media. I can search the Internet via other engines. I can send and receive email from my personal mail server. Assuming their futures mimic their present—which is probably a bad assumption—of these four, the disappearance of Facebook, Google, and Apple would be of little or no consequence to my life.
Jdam 9y ago
Calling it "Apple Pods" gave me enough information to judge the trustworthiness of that guy.
bwl 9y ago
They each function as public institutions in their respective spaces and each is backed with substantial real world fibre and data centers.
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  How is Apple a public institution?
jl6 9y ago
Begone, foul clickbait headline that thinks it can excuse itself by putting a question mark at the end.
- cirgue 9y ago
  Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
jpalomaki 9y ago
Especially Google and Facebook area extremely well positioned to know what is happening. They have a market research machinery never seen in history. If there's a new trendy thing catching up, they can see it coming and they know exactly who is interested. As long as governments don't intervene, they are in quite strong position to just acquire threats (or develop something similar). Apple has piles of cash, but I think their business is kind of fragile. The valuation is based on being able to create products which sell for very high premium. I don't see them going away, but they might dropped from their top position. For the Facebook and Google I believe the major risk is some backslash from legislation/privacy. Something like this would not wipe them out, but it might seriously damage the business. For example with Google there could be pressure to separate the search and advertising or to allow other companies to also offer ads on the search platform.
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  The legislative backlash will begin under this administration. You can already find right wing sites advocating for it.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    And while the US has been slow to act, other countries are already massively stepping up antitrust and privacy enforcement. While most of these big tech cos are based here in the US, international regulation has a massive effect on the bottom line.
- scarface74 9y ago
  Google hasn't in it's entire history shown an ability to make money on anything besides advertising. What happens when everyone has ad blockers, they do most of their searches through mobile and Facebook eats up more advertising revenue because they can do better targeting than Google since they know more about their users? Facebook -- Facebook is already seen as a place for old people. Once your grandmother is on FB, teens don't want to use it. A whole generation of people are growing up using everything but FB. Apple -I don't see it dying but I do see it shrinking. Amazon- because of network affects, the cost of building warehouses, etc. It's will be hard for someone to kill Amazon.
GuB-42 9y ago
I think everything can be summarized in these two lines from the article. Do you think that will be in the next few decades or too hard to predict? Galloway: Too hard to predict.
polskibus 9y ago
I find it interesting that many similar analyses very often omit Microsoft. Yet it also has astonishing breadth of offering along with very deep vertical integration that is a characteristic of modern monopolies 2.0.
- Retric 9y ago
  Microsoft can clearly become another IBM and survive long term. But, it's less clear if they can stay a major 'tech' company as they have a very poor record outside of OS/Office /Enterprise applications. AKA web/phone/tables/console gaming/peripherals/etc are effectively break even in terms of revenue.
chinathrow 9y ago
Marketwatch is a SEO optimized site, the text is a pain to read with all the distractions to generate more page views. Back to the topic, I do hope the large companies will be split up by regulation sooner than later.
jfoster 9y ago
I would feel nervous about applying old company rules to these companies. Nothing will be around forever, but if any companies ever (so far) might last, I would pick these ones.
breitling 9y ago
Why isn't Microsoft mentioned in the same sentence as these four? Have people already written them off?
- jkw 9y ago
  Microsoft was mentioned in the article as the Fifth Horsemen. Not part of the original because it's more of a B2B company now.
darkhorn 9y ago
Facebook is just social networking web site. People can get bored and use some other web site. Amazon is only a shopping web site and a hosting company. There are popular companis like Amazon, such as AliBaba and DigitalOcean. There is nothing special about Amazon. Google is a search engine, smart phone OS, mail, maps, video service, web browser. Looks like Google has way more chanse than Facebook and Amazon.
- luckydude 9y ago
  I think you underestimate the value of all the product reviews on Amazon. While I doubt that I've been influenced by ads on Google, I'm influenced all the time by the reviews on Amazon. Yeah, Amazon needs to do better about the fake reviews (and they are working on it, it's gotten better). But there is a huge amount of value tied up in those reviews. I'd argue that it creates such a network effect that starting up a competitor would be really hard. Possible but Amazon would have to stumble.
  - darkhorn 9y ago
    What about reviews in Turkish language and what about shipping to Turkey? Amazon is mostly for English speaking world. On the other hand Google, Apple, Microsoft has no language barrier. Amazon is 4th among them.
LorenzoLlamas 9y ago
Rats. I was hoping they would all go away within 5 years. Thought maybe the extra 0 was a typo. Disappointed. How can serious people still be on Facebook more than five years from now? This is demoralizing enough for me to subscribe to USA Today, the paper version, because it's an improvement. Pie charts and all.

49 points by aaronkchsu 9y ago

I would think google can last because they do a lot of infrastructure as well. These are not things that stand or fall by current (marketing) trends. At least not directly. Amazon is atm heavily moving towards infrastructure based business as well like AWS or drone delivery services. Apple has the money I feel like to brute force themselves into markets, but as a brand it's already changing away from the "Steve Jobs factor". This can go both ways. Facebook for me is the most likely. While no social media before it has ever been as big or influential, these things do heavily fall or stand by culture. IRC to MSN Messenger to Forums and such have faded away considerably. To not expect similar would be to argue against human nature's tendency to evolve and move on. Especially the social stuff. Again they as well have been steering away to more "safer" markets for a while now, which seems wise. They equally posses resources to potentially force themselves into future fast growing markets that does not come from their own turf.

659087 9y ago

Not if we keep letting them acquire every potential competitor.

samsonradu 9y ago

Disagree with the author’s point of view on Netflix. I think it is quite a fragile business, with no monopoly whatsoever. I’m not much of a movie/series consumer though so might be biased about it.

mholmes680 9y ago
I agree with you on Netflix. 5th horsemen candidates on my short list: Microsoft and SoftBank. Tesla if they can stop burning money and cut out the hype? Verizon as a long stretch.
- oblio 9y ago
  Microsoft was founded in 1975, 42 years ago. People underrate them, but I'd say they're quite resilient. And now they're the #2 player in the cloud segment, so they should cover for their Windows cash cow just fine :)
  - ci5er 9y ago
    Is Windows an ex-cash-cow?
    - oblio 9y ago
      I edited that part and now removed it since I was partly joking.
larrik 9y ago
I don't know, they have their own high quality content, and their TV back catalog is good. I would think they have a brighter future than many television companies, especially ones like HBO/Showtime and other special subscription companies. That said, they have less of a safety net than the others, with no cable deals to fall back on (which are steadily eroding from underneath the others anyway). However, they seem to be very good at knowing how to run their business, so I wouldn't count them out unless some outside forces take effect. Their name has been synonymous with streaming for a decade, which will keep them entrenched at least a while longer than they would otherwise deserve. I think if they had a serious stumble, Amazon would just buy them anyway.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  i think if they stumbled, google would be the buyer. or maybe microsoft. amazon already built their version of netflix, the only thing they would need to acquire is the original content, and consumers seem to be so fickle over content anyways a licensing deal with the real buyer would be better business strategy. (probably).
- AJ007 9y ago
  I’m not sure how long they get to keep their back catalog. Has anything been licensed indefinitely? Their business is certainly going to only continue to increase in competitiveness for the foreseeable future. My primary concern, from Netflix’s view, would be Amazon being comfortable buying video content at a loss forever.
  - zck 9y ago
    > I’m not sure how long they get to keep their back catalog. Has anything been licensed indefinitely? At a minimum, they have their original series^1. I would assume that, as part of paying for the various shows to be created, Netflix has rights forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...
    - 9y ago
twblalock 9y ago
I think the streaming movie/TV market is the same as any other commoditized market -- the businesses that survive need to find a way to differentiate themselves or offer something nobody else does. I think the original content is what will keep Netflix alive in the long run. There are a lot of other places to see movies and TV shows, but you can only see Netflix original content on Netflix (unless you pirate it).

trts 9y ago

I was thinking about how cumbersome it would be to change phone platforms if I got tired of iPhone or Android, and then how much effort I wouldn't want to spend if my Amazon device controlled all the lights, TV, audio, and temperature in my house.

ksk 9y ago
I think more than the individual effort of changing systems, its the network effect that keeps people tied down. A new platform or service could disrupt that easily. What if you didn't need to carry a phone (VR/AR/?), or what if all homes came with those systems built in.

cobookman 9y ago

Apple has enough cash on hand that they'll be able to make 0 profit for the next 50 years and still be around.

romeoEtJoliet 9y ago
It's true that Apple has mountains of cash, but in all likelihood, a failing Apple-sized tech giant would end up acquired by an adjacent company (see Motorola or Yahoo or Sun Microsystems ) before they ran out of money.
ksk 9y ago
Not really. If they decide to screw over the shareholders like that, they won't take it lying down. Cook will be out ASAP.
- cobookman 9y ago
  Fair enough.
tristanj 9y ago
Only if they stop giving it back to their shareholders. Since they started their buyback program in 2012 Apple has 'returned' over $222 billion to shareholders [0]. Presently they are issuing debt to finance the buybacks & dividends. If they are not careful they may end up like IBM. [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/05/apple-5b-bond-sale-funding-buybacks-dividends/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/05/apple-5b-bond-sale-fund...
- heartbreak 9y ago
  That debt is borrowed against offshore holdings that they plan to repatriate when the tax conditions are more favorable.

CodeSheikh 9y ago

The reason there never will be a "fifth" horseman is because these four giant fishes keep devouring the little ones (startup acquisition/acqui-hire). Just because things happened in past a certain way, that does not necessarily mean those events can always be used as a predictability model for future. Stock market is at all time time. Are we headed towards crash? Maybe not. Maybe this is the time where we are setting new standards. Yes, all these four have slowed down their momentum of innovation. But that innovation also goes hand-in-hand with general intelligence and thirst for innovation from the general public. I hope to see one them entering into consumer health monitoring and diagnostics, beyond heart BPM or steps counting. I will give them another decade before I give up on them. I hope the author made some good bucks towards the end. He raised a good debate.

greedo 9y ago
Who's to say the next horseman won't resist the advances from the big Four? Zuckerberg retained control for a long time, and it's not inconceivable that the Next Big Thing won't get acquihired.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  everything has a price, no? especially a public company with shareholder voting rights...
  - uiri 9y ago
    I think Snapchat is a good example. The founder(s) still have a controlling interest in the company (or they did up until the IPO, at least). They want to build a company rather than sell it off. That's why they IPO'd, for instance.

bhauer 9y ago

Aside from a few exceptions, I don't wish death on any big companies. I would nevertheless like to see each of the named company's dominance reduced substantially if only to see what the alternatives look like once afforded some breathing room. As much as network effects are an inevitable part of the human condition, I rail against the behavior as the very small market actor I am. In my day-to-day market activities, I regularly seek out less-dominant vendors and service providers. Of the named companies, I am most comfortable with Amazon. Most interactions I have with Amazon yield a tangible service predicated on me being the customer. While some alternatives provide better browsing and discovery, there are few online shopping sites that provide the convenience and immediacy of Amazon. Apple would presumably also treat me as the customer, but I don't like the design of their devices or software and there are good alternatives. As a non-customer, Apple's existence doesn't offend me, but I do find them tedious and the amount of media attention they capture can be exhausting. Facebook and Google don't have business models that permit them to consistently treat me as the customer, so I do what I can to avoid their services. What services they do provide (for "free") are of low value to me. I can interact with friends on a wide array of communication media. I can search the Internet via other engines. I can send and receive email from my personal mail server. Assuming their futures mimic their present—which is probably a bad assumption—of these four, the disappearance of Facebook, Google, and Apple would be of little or no consequence to my life.

Jdam 9y ago

Calling it "Apple Pods" gave me enough information to judge the trustworthiness of that guy.

bwl 9y ago

They each function as public institutions in their respective spaces and each is backed with substantial real world fibre and data centers.

yellow_postit 9y ago
How is Apple a public institution?

jl6 9y ago

Begone, foul clickbait headline that thinks it can excuse itself by putting a question mark at the end.

cirgue 9y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".

jpalomaki 9y ago

Especially Google and Facebook area extremely well positioned to know what is happening. They have a market research machinery never seen in history. If there's a new trendy thing catching up, they can see it coming and they know exactly who is interested. As long as governments don't intervene, they are in quite strong position to just acquire threats (or develop something similar). Apple has piles of cash, but I think their business is kind of fragile. The valuation is based on being able to create products which sell for very high premium. I don't see them going away, but they might dropped from their top position. For the Facebook and Google I believe the major risk is some backslash from legislation/privacy. Something like this would not wipe them out, but it might seriously damage the business. For example with Google there could be pressure to separate the search and advertising or to allow other companies to also offer ads on the search platform.

godzillabrennus 9y ago
The legislative backlash will begin under this administration. You can already find right wing sites advocating for it.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  And while the US has been slow to act, other countries are already massively stepping up antitrust and privacy enforcement. While most of these big tech cos are based here in the US, international regulation has a massive effect on the bottom line.
scarface74 9y ago
Google hasn't in it's entire history shown an ability to make money on anything besides advertising. What happens when everyone has ad blockers, they do most of their searches through mobile and Facebook eats up more advertising revenue because they can do better targeting than Google since they know more about their users? Facebook -- Facebook is already seen as a place for old people. Once your grandmother is on FB, teens don't want to use it. A whole generation of people are growing up using everything but FB. Apple -I don't see it dying but I do see it shrinking. Amazon- because of network affects, the cost of building warehouses, etc. It's will be hard for someone to kill Amazon.

GuB-42 9y ago

I think everything can be summarized in these two lines from the article. Do you think that will be in the next few decades or too hard to predict? Galloway: Too hard to predict.

polskibus 9y ago

I find it interesting that many similar analyses very often omit Microsoft. Yet it also has astonishing breadth of offering along with very deep vertical integration that is a characteristic of modern monopolies 2.0.

Retric 9y ago
Microsoft can clearly become another IBM and survive long term. But, it's less clear if they can stay a major 'tech' company as they have a very poor record outside of OS/Office /Enterprise applications. AKA web/phone/tables/console gaming/peripherals/etc are effectively break even in terms of revenue.

chinathrow 9y ago

Marketwatch is a SEO optimized site, the text is a pain to read with all the distractions to generate more page views. Back to the topic, I do hope the large companies will be split up by regulation sooner than later.

jfoster 9y ago

I would feel nervous about applying old company rules to these companies. Nothing will be around forever, but if any companies ever (so far) might last, I would pick these ones.

breitling 9y ago

Why isn't Microsoft mentioned in the same sentence as these four? Have people already written them off?

jkw 9y ago
Microsoft was mentioned in the article as the Fifth Horsemen. Not part of the original because it's more of a B2B company now.

darkhorn 9y ago

Facebook is just social networking web site. People can get bored and use some other web site. Amazon is only a shopping web site and a hosting company. There are popular companis like Amazon, such as AliBaba and DigitalOcean. There is nothing special about Amazon. Google is a search engine, smart phone OS, mail, maps, video service, web browser. Looks like Google has way more chanse than Facebook and Amazon.

luckydude 9y ago
I think you underestimate the value of all the product reviews on Amazon. While I doubt that I've been influenced by ads on Google, I'm influenced all the time by the reviews on Amazon. Yeah, Amazon needs to do better about the fake reviews (and they are working on it, it's gotten better). But there is a huge amount of value tied up in those reviews. I'd argue that it creates such a network effect that starting up a competitor would be really hard. Possible but Amazon would have to stumble.
- darkhorn 9y ago
  What about reviews in Turkish language and what about shipping to Turkey? Amazon is mostly for English speaking world. On the other hand Google, Apple, Microsoft has no language barrier. Amazon is 4th among them.

LorenzoLlamas 9y ago

Rats. I was hoping they would all go away within 5 years. Thought maybe the extra 0 was a typo. Disappointed. How can serious people still be on Facebook more than five years from now? This is demoralizing enough for me to subscribe to USA Today, the paper version, because it's an improvement. Pie charts and all.