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Every 'era' has some set of folk who think whatever hot thing is "invincible" and all of them are wrong, every time. Even in cases like Apple (which was very vi

by zeruch 4y ago

Every 'era' has some set of folk who think whatever hot thing is "invincible" and all of them are wrong, every time. Even in cases like Apple (which was very vincible for a long time) and IBM (which is the only major firm to pivot multiple times over a century and still roam about as a major player) had to adapt hard, and they are outliers. The rest are just dead, assimilated into other players, etc. The industry has always been dynamic and most aspects, very very fungible.

abraxas 4y ago
To your point, I remember growing up in the mid eighties to early nineties there were a handful of "invincible" companies that we were sure weren't going ANYWHERE within our lifetimes: * Sun Microsystems * Silicon Graphics * Cisco * Hewlett Packard * Digital * Compaq * Intel * Motorola * Atari plus some "invincible" Japanese power houses (especially in the eighties): * Sony * Panasonic * Hitachi * Sanyo * TDK If anyone in the late nineties told me that there would be a pocket computer built in 2008 that would be owned or aspired to by everyone on the planet from teenagers to CEOs my investment would likely go to Palm, Handspring or Motorola. Certainly NOT Apple or Google (the latter of which wasn't even around until the late nineties). That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  I’m not sure this list is particularly accurate. Many American companies are still most certainly alive and kicking (HP/HPE; Intel; Cisco; Motorola), and the Japanese ones manufacture plenty of other things besides just computer hardware. Hitachi, for instance, sold its HGST hard drive business to WD, but it also makes a lot of heavy-industry and defence equipment, including tanks, APCs, rolling-stock, lifts, and construction equipment. Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of CMOS sensors (almost every single smartphone uses a Sony sensor), and not even including its music, film, video game, camera, and smartphone divisions. Sure, they don’t make VAIO notebooks and Walkmans any more, but they almost certainly have a massive monopoly/duopoly over many of their other divisions. It’s just survival of the fittest. You could’ve said the same thing about aeroplane companies throughout the ‘50s to ‘90s. Almost every other American company has been subsumed into Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the same goes for many other British companies that are now BAE Systems, and European companies that are now Airbus.
  - abraxas 4y ago
    Yeah, I know that Hitachi makes industrial equipment. I'm talking consumer products divisions here. Also yes, HP is alive. It is a shadow of its former self when it comes to the impact on the industry. Sony is the name that fared best in the consumer space due to the outsized impact of the Playstation franchise. But again, it's a shadow of the presence it had in the households worldwide in the 80's. You had to be around then to appreciate just how ubiquitous their consumer electronics was. Sony was the Apple Inc of the eighties.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Sony. The one and only. The tagline was true at the time.
      - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
        It feels like LG and Samsung just came out of nowhere to take over the TV market.
        abraxas 4y ago
        Oh, they were around in the eighties. Except at the time they made crap bought by those who could not afford a Sony. LG was called GoldStar at the time and had to rebrand as the original name was in tatters due to their poor quality. However, they ground it out patiently into dominance, over decades.
        SoftTalker 4y ago
        Oddly enough I have a GoldStar microwave oven I bought in the late 1980s and it still works perfectly. I use it almost daily.
        SanjayMehta 4y ago
        Lucky Goldstar to be precise. One of the first colour TV sets I saw as a kid. We didn't have colour transmission until the early 80s.
- alwillis 4y ago
  That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable Not all of us thought it was unthinkable at the time. Many of these companies made strategic mistakes that resulted in them being a shadow of their former selves. Even though Unix was born on their hardware in the 70s, DEC never embraced it, preferring their VMS operating system instead. They eventually created Ultrix, their version of BSD Unix, but by then it was too late. Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO basically said he didn’t see why anyone would need a computer at home [1] which obviously was incorrect. (He probably meant a minicomputer but still.) DEC eventually came out with a line of PCs called the Rainbow but again, they missed the boat. DEC was a chip foundry back then and an early ARM licensee; they created the StrongARM processor [2] that was used in one of Apple’s Newton MessagePads, which was quite a technological leap at the time compared to the Palm Pilot and Handspring. I owned a Palm at the time but the Newton was on another level. Why was the StrongARM so good? Because DEC created Alpha, their own RISC processor and used what they learned to improve ARM. For the noobs, yes, their was an ARM-based mobile device made by Apple in the ‘90s that wasn’t commercially successful but it showed the way forward. DEC sold its StrongARM IP and its chip fab to IBM to settle a lawsuit. So DEC missed out on Unix, PCs and today’s dominant RISC processor because of some bad decisions; more likely, a lack of vision. And let’s not forget that Intel was also an ARM licensee for a while, too. In an alternate universe, it’s Intel making ARM chips for Apple and not TSMC. It’s kinda ironic that Apple dropped Intel’s x86 processors for its own ARM-based processors, an architecture Intel once made. HP famously passed on the Apple II, the computer that ignited the personal computer revolution, that its employee Steve Wozniak had worked on with his friend Steve Jobs. It’s also ironic Apple, declared dead so many times during the 80’s and 90’s, ended up where it is today. [1]: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Sun's arguably going strong with Java and probably servers, though all are in disguise, known as Oracle products for the last ten years.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Goes beyond tech. There is a graveyard of elephant corporations out there. I'll say one day thing about capitalism: it is always in flux.

by zeruch 4y ago

abraxas 4y ago

To your point, I remember growing up in the mid eighties to early nineties there were a handful of "invincible" companies that we were sure weren't going ANYWHERE within our lifetimes: * Sun Microsystems * Silicon Graphics * Cisco * Hewlett Packard * Digital * Compaq * Intel * Motorola * Atari plus some "invincible" Japanese power houses (especially in the eighties): * Sony * Panasonic * Hitachi * Sanyo * TDK If anyone in the late nineties told me that there would be a pocket computer built in 2008 that would be owned or aspired to by everyone on the planet from teenagers to CEOs my investment would likely go to Palm, Handspring or Motorola. Certainly NOT Apple or Google (the latter of which wasn't even around until the late nineties). That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
I’m not sure this list is particularly accurate. Many American companies are still most certainly alive and kicking (HP/HPE; Intel; Cisco; Motorola), and the Japanese ones manufacture plenty of other things besides just computer hardware. Hitachi, for instance, sold its HGST hard drive business to WD, but it also makes a lot of heavy-industry and defence equipment, including tanks, APCs, rolling-stock, lifts, and construction equipment. Sony is by far the biggest manufacturer of CMOS sensors (almost every single smartphone uses a Sony sensor), and not even including its music, film, video game, camera, and smartphone divisions. Sure, they don’t make VAIO notebooks and Walkmans any more, but they almost certainly have a massive monopoly/duopoly over many of their other divisions. It’s just survival of the fittest. You could’ve said the same thing about aeroplane companies throughout the ‘50s to ‘90s. Almost every other American company has been subsumed into Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the same goes for many other British companies that are now BAE Systems, and European companies that are now Airbus.
- abraxas 4y ago
  Yeah, I know that Hitachi makes industrial equipment. I'm talking consumer products divisions here. Also yes, HP is alive. It is a shadow of its former self when it comes to the impact on the industry. Sony is the name that fared best in the consumer space due to the outsized impact of the Playstation franchise. But again, it's a shadow of the presence it had in the households worldwide in the 80's. You had to be around then to appreciate just how ubiquitous their consumer electronics was. Sony was the Apple Inc of the eighties.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Sony. The one and only. The tagline was true at the time.
    - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      It feels like LG and Samsung just came out of nowhere to take over the TV market.
      - abraxas 4y ago
        Oh, they were around in the eighties. Except at the time they made crap bought by those who could not afford a Sony. LG was called GoldStar at the time and had to rebrand as the original name was in tatters due to their poor quality. However, they ground it out patiently into dominance, over decades.
        SoftTalker 4y ago
        Oddly enough I have a GoldStar microwave oven I bought in the late 1980s and it still works perfectly. I use it almost daily.
        SanjayMehta 4y ago
        Lucky Goldstar to be precise. One of the first colour TV sets I saw as a kid. We didn't have colour transmission until the early 80s.
alwillis 4y ago
That any of the above would be dead or shadows of their former selves within 30 years was simply unthinkable Not all of us thought it was unthinkable at the time. Many of these companies made strategic mistakes that resulted in them being a shadow of their former selves. Even though Unix was born on their hardware in the 70s, DEC never embraced it, preferring their VMS operating system instead. They eventually created Ultrix, their version of BSD Unix, but by then it was too late. Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO basically said he didn’t see why anyone would need a computer at home [1] which obviously was incorrect. (He probably meant a minicomputer but still.) DEC eventually came out with a line of PCs called the Rainbow but again, they missed the boat. DEC was a chip foundry back then and an early ARM licensee; they created the StrongARM processor [2] that was used in one of Apple’s Newton MessagePads, which was quite a technological leap at the time compared to the Palm Pilot and Handspring. I owned a Palm at the time but the Newton was on another level. Why was the StrongARM so good? Because DEC created Alpha, their own RISC processor and used what they learned to improve ARM. For the noobs, yes, their was an ARM-based mobile device made by Apple in the ‘90s that wasn’t commercially successful but it showed the way forward. DEC sold its StrongARM IP and its chip fab to IBM to settle a lawsuit. So DEC missed out on Unix, PCs and today’s dominant RISC processor because of some bad decisions; more likely, a lack of vision. And let’s not forget that Intel was also an ARM licensee for a while, too. In an alternate universe, it’s Intel making ARM chips for Apple and not TSMC. It’s kinda ironic that Apple dropped Intel’s x86 processors for its own ARM-based processors, an architecture Intel once made. HP famously passed on the Apple II, the computer that ignited the personal computer revolution, that its employee Steve Wozniak had worked on with his friend Steve Jobs. It’s also ironic Apple, declared dead so many times during the 80’s and 90’s, ended up where it is today. [1]: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/868.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Sun's arguably going strong with Java and probably servers, though all are in disguise, known as Oracle products for the last ten years.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Goes beyond tech. There is a graveyard of elephant corporations out there. I'll say one day thing about capitalism: it is always in flux.