4 ms·

- WOW. 1st of all, thank you for the response. I really appreciate it. So do you think that these companies will always be the best? Always be tech giants? Also

- WOW. 1st of all, thank you for the response. I really appreciate it. So do you think that these companies will always be the best? Always be tech giants? Also do you think the best thing for startups to do is to get money from rich friends rather than get into an incubator's program? I will really like your answer on these questions.

shanelja 14y ago
I only really feel qualified to answer the first and second questions you pose to the parent: Firstly, we live in a new age, home computing as we know it is less than 50 years old, the industry is still growing exponentially and finding its feet, but it is like any other industry, over time, giants come and go. Take for example the investment bank Goldman Sachs, when the news came out, the headlines said the bank was "too big to fail" and only a government bailout saved it, but now it is as a company barely a shadow of it's former self. Even the biggest companies come and go, normally at the whim of the consumer, it's true that these companies control a large part of our mentality when it comes to buying and selling, advertising and our opinions and feelings towards anything they can relate to a brand in any way, but all it takes is to lose favor with your customers and you will soon be finding yourself laying off thousands of staff. Simply put, these companies will very unlikely always be giants, I would guess that in 100 years only 2 of these companies will be a house hold name (if they are lucky, or make good business choices, whatever you attribute their continued existence and fertility to) and in 200 years, most likely one, or none. That isn't to say that other giants won't step up in their place, likely also without the aid of incubators, but to use a simple anecdote, you can bring up a Lion in captivity, and it will grow up to be a perfectly healthy Lion with a nice mane and big, sharp teeth, but if you put it in a cage with a Lion who had to fight it's way to survive in the harshness of the wilderness, normally, the other Lion will tear it apart. Simply put, companies which have already fought hard battles to get where they are, will be the ones to fight however hard it takes to stay in that place.
- quickquestion 14y ago
  Thank you shanelja for your response. I really appreciate it. I see where you coming from in terms of giants not always going to be here as well as how when two different lions are raised differently in (terms of environments) they will have different strength. Thanks.
georgemcbay 14y ago
"So do you think that these companies will always be the best? Always be tech giants?" That's an odd question. If you asked it 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago many of the names would be different. Sun, SGI, DEC, Myspace, Lotus, AOL, Palm, RIM, etc, would appear depending upon the era and of course the answer to the question of them always being tech giants was "no". Some of those in your list will survive, others won't, and some will wax and wane (which Apple already has a few times).
- quickquestion 14y ago
  Thank you for the response georgemcbay. But yes I kind of do think that these companies will always be the best. I mean whats out there that can be Google or Facebook? Or Microsoft? Amazon, maybe not. Apple might last for a long time too.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    What's out there that can beat Excite or Myspace? What MMO could possible compete with the mighty Everquest?
    - quickquestion 14y ago
      - Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest. I would do research on them. As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago.
      - georgemcbay 14y ago
        "Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest." Exactly! "As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago." Yes, just like Myspace destroyed Friendster. Do you see where this is going?
        quickquestion 14y ago
        - lol.
orionblastar 14y ago
No, any company has a certain chance to fail no matter how big or how long they were in existence. There is always a risk involved with business, not earning profits, not innovating properly, your competitors have better products and better customer service, etc. Before Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc there were companies like DEC, Wang, Sperry, Excite, Lycos, Frindster, Myspace, Commodore, Atari, etc. DEC and Wang and Sperry basically went out of business due to Microsoft and the IBM PC Clones taking away business from their minicomputer market. Who needs a DEC Vax or WANG VS when you can run these cheaper PC clones with MS-DOS or Windows? I was a programmer than ported code from Mainframes and Minicomputers to the PC, so that employers I worked for could get rid of the 'dinosaurs' and switch to a client-server model with PCs instead. Excite and Lycos had web search engines, email, and other features, Google came out and somehow put them out of business even if they all did the same things. Frindster and Myspace, where the original social networking sites, Facebook put them out of business as did GPlus and LinkedIn and others. Commodore and Atari still exist but are shells of what they used to be. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy, they were bought and sold. Atari had the lead in the arcade and video game console markets, but they treated their programmers like crap and limited the amount of memory they could use for the 2600 cartridges. Many Atari programmers left to found Activation, Imagic, and others and later on Atari found out that anyone can make video games for the 2600 console without paying Atari royalties or licenses. Atari tried other game consoles like the 5200 and 7800 that didn't do so well, and never made the Graduatior Keyboard to turn the Atari 2600 into a full blown Computer. The Atari 8 bit series did well, the Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 1200XL but they needed something better as Apple was catching up with the IIc series. Jack Tramiel left Commodore and bought Atari and put his son Sam Tramiel in charge of making the Atari ST series with DRI's GEM as a GUI and TOS. It was cheaper than Apple's Macintosh and did color. Meanwhile at Commodore they had a good run on the VIC-20 and later Commodore 64, and released the Commodore 128 that ran C64 programs and CP/M programs. Commodore bought the Amiga company in a bidding war with Atari, Commodore released the Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985 around the same time as the Atari ST and both had almost the same features. The Amiga was Tripos based, written in BCPL, and had the GUI of Workbench. Both Commodore and Atari had an advantage over the Macintosh and PC, they had better sound, more colors, and sold their computers for a fraction of the price of a real Macintosh or PC. But that quickly ended as Apple made the Macintosh II line with faster CPUs, and IBM developed the PS/2 series with VGA and AdLib/Soundblaster sound cards became standard in the PC industry. Once Windows 95 came out, it not only blew away the Atari ST or Amiga, it even hurt Apple's Macintosh sales. Atari and Commodore could not get enough software developers to support their platform other than some video game makers. Atari tried the 64 bit Jaguar video game console and it was a flop. Commodore tried to make the Amiga into the CD32 video game console, but it flopped because of a patent troll over the use of the XOR function to blink the cursor. People are only now finding out that Apple's stock was way over valued and over hyped, and that without Steve Jobs Apple's products are not as good in quality as they used to be. Apple Maps was a disaster and iOS 6 is buggy on older devices but not the newer devices. Microsoft too is over hyped and over valued in stock. Windows 8 isn't doing too great, most sales are new system sales with Windows 8 pre-bundled, but most people downgrade to Windows 7 or XP, and some even go to Linux. The Microsoft Surface tablets have major flaws, and they are to Apple's iPad what the Microsoft Zune was to the Apple iPod. The XBox 360 is poor quality crap with overheating issues causing a red ring of death, and now lower cost Android based video game consoles are coming out that not only work better but can do a lot of things the XBox 360 cannot. Almost every web project Microsoft tried has failed, Hotmail, Windows Live, MSN, now they regrouped with Bing and migrating Windows Live to Skydrive and Skype. Anyway IBM once was the tech giant that everyone came after to try and beat, it is no longer a tech giant. Everyone cloned their PC/AT series, Microsoft back-stabbed them in DOS and OS/2, Amdal and others cloned their mainframes, their AIX RS/4000 series lost out to Linux, IBM eventually migrated to Linux in order to survive. Remember Novel? They had a product called Netware that did file and print services for DOS and Windows machines. Until Microsoft developed Windows NT Server, and Linux had a SAMBA project to work as a file and print server for PCs. Novel was a giant, but not so much now. They migrated to Linux as well to survive. You will find that over 90% of incubator projects fail, and become Dotbombs. Of the 20 top billion dollar industries, only thee of them were incubator projects. That is because most of them don't have a valid working business plan. Almost all of them have a freenium model of the web site is free, and they sell advertising and sell user private info, but that isn't enough to work anymore. Many fail because they didn't do the research into seeing if the project is feasible, or if there is even a need for it in the market and how many people exist in that market. Most just go coding on day one, work 20 hour days, 6 days a week and burn themselves out with almost nothing to show for it in revenue. Once the seed money is gone, your employees walk out the door because you cannot pay them salaries anymore. Thus projects are half-finished, and they are in some programming language like Go that is too new to find enough programmers willing to work cheap to finish it. The three that became billion dollar companies basically won the lottery. Knowing computer science and engineering is great, but learn business management as well.

shanelja 14y ago

I only really feel qualified to answer the first and second questions you pose to the parent: Firstly, we live in a new age, home computing as we know it is less than 50 years old, the industry is still growing exponentially and finding its feet, but it is like any other industry, over time, giants come and go. Take for example the investment bank Goldman Sachs, when the news came out, the headlines said the bank was "too big to fail" and only a government bailout saved it, but now it is as a company barely a shadow of it's former self. Even the biggest companies come and go, normally at the whim of the consumer, it's true that these companies control a large part of our mentality when it comes to buying and selling, advertising and our opinions and feelings towards anything they can relate to a brand in any way, but all it takes is to lose favor with your customers and you will soon be finding yourself laying off thousands of staff. Simply put, these companies will very unlikely always be giants, I would guess that in 100 years only 2 of these companies will be a house hold name (if they are lucky, or make good business choices, whatever you attribute their continued existence and fertility to) and in 200 years, most likely one, or none. That isn't to say that other giants won't step up in their place, likely also without the aid of incubators, but to use a simple anecdote, you can bring up a Lion in captivity, and it will grow up to be a perfectly healthy Lion with a nice mane and big, sharp teeth, but if you put it in a cage with a Lion who had to fight it's way to survive in the harshness of the wilderness, normally, the other Lion will tear it apart. Simply put, companies which have already fought hard battles to get where they are, will be the ones to fight however hard it takes to stay in that place.

quickquestion 14y ago
Thank you shanelja for your response. I really appreciate it. I see where you coming from in terms of giants not always going to be here as well as how when two different lions are raised differently in (terms of environments) they will have different strength. Thanks.

georgemcbay 14y ago

"So do you think that these companies will always be the best? Always be tech giants?" That's an odd question. If you asked it 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago many of the names would be different. Sun, SGI, DEC, Myspace, Lotus, AOL, Palm, RIM, etc, would appear depending upon the era and of course the answer to the question of them always being tech giants was "no". Some of those in your list will survive, others won't, and some will wax and wane (which Apple already has a few times).

quickquestion 14y ago
Thank you for the response georgemcbay. But yes I kind of do think that these companies will always be the best. I mean whats out there that can be Google or Facebook? Or Microsoft? Amazon, maybe not. Apple might last for a long time too.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  What's out there that can beat Excite or Myspace? What MMO could possible compete with the mighty Everquest?
  - quickquestion 14y ago
    - Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest. I would do research on them. As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      "Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest." Exactly! "As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago." Yes, just like Myspace destroyed Friendster. Do you see where this is going?
      - quickquestion 14y ago
        - lol.

orionblastar 14y ago

No, any company has a certain chance to fail no matter how big or how long they were in existence. There is always a risk involved with business, not earning profits, not innovating properly, your competitors have better products and better customer service, etc. Before Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc there were companies like DEC, Wang, Sperry, Excite, Lycos, Frindster, Myspace, Commodore, Atari, etc. DEC and Wang and Sperry basically went out of business due to Microsoft and the IBM PC Clones taking away business from their minicomputer market. Who needs a DEC Vax or WANG VS when you can run these cheaper PC clones with MS-DOS or Windows? I was a programmer than ported code from Mainframes and Minicomputers to the PC, so that employers I worked for could get rid of the 'dinosaurs' and switch to a client-server model with PCs instead. Excite and Lycos had web search engines, email, and other features, Google came out and somehow put them out of business even if they all did the same things. Frindster and Myspace, where the original social networking sites, Facebook put them out of business as did GPlus and LinkedIn and others. Commodore and Atari still exist but are shells of what they used to be. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy, they were bought and sold. Atari had the lead in the arcade and video game console markets, but they treated their programmers like crap and limited the amount of memory they could use for the 2600 cartridges. Many Atari programmers left to found Activation, Imagic, and others and later on Atari found out that anyone can make video games for the 2600 console without paying Atari royalties or licenses. Atari tried other game consoles like the 5200 and 7800 that didn't do so well, and never made the Graduatior Keyboard to turn the Atari 2600 into a full blown Computer. The Atari 8 bit series did well, the Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 1200XL but they needed something better as Apple was catching up with the IIc series. Jack Tramiel left Commodore and bought Atari and put his son Sam Tramiel in charge of making the Atari ST series with DRI's GEM as a GUI and TOS. It was cheaper than Apple's Macintosh and did color. Meanwhile at Commodore they had a good run on the VIC-20 and later Commodore 64, and released the Commodore 128 that ran C64 programs and CP/M programs. Commodore bought the Amiga company in a bidding war with Atari, Commodore released the Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985 around the same time as the Atari ST and both had almost the same features. The Amiga was Tripos based, written in BCPL, and had the GUI of Workbench. Both Commodore and Atari had an advantage over the Macintosh and PC, they had better sound, more colors, and sold their computers for a fraction of the price of a real Macintosh or PC. But that quickly ended as Apple made the Macintosh II line with faster CPUs, and IBM developed the PS/2 series with VGA and AdLib/Soundblaster sound cards became standard in the PC industry. Once Windows 95 came out, it not only blew away the Atari ST or Amiga, it even hurt Apple's Macintosh sales. Atari and Commodore could not get enough software developers to support their platform other than some video game makers. Atari tried the 64 bit Jaguar video game console and it was a flop. Commodore tried to make the Amiga into the CD32 video game console, but it flopped because of a patent troll over the use of the XOR function to blink the cursor. People are only now finding out that Apple's stock was way over valued and over hyped, and that without Steve Jobs Apple's products are not as good in quality as they used to be. Apple Maps was a disaster and iOS 6 is buggy on older devices but not the newer devices. Microsoft too is over hyped and over valued in stock. Windows 8 isn't doing too great, most sales are new system sales with Windows 8 pre-bundled, but most people downgrade to Windows 7 or XP, and some even go to Linux. The Microsoft Surface tablets have major flaws, and they are to Apple's iPad what the Microsoft Zune was to the Apple iPod. The XBox 360 is poor quality crap with overheating issues causing a red ring of death, and now lower cost Android based video game consoles are coming out that not only work better but can do a lot of things the XBox 360 cannot. Almost every web project Microsoft tried has failed, Hotmail, Windows Live, MSN, now they regrouped with Bing and migrating Windows Live to Skydrive and Skype. Anyway IBM once was the tech giant that everyone came after to try and beat, it is no longer a tech giant. Everyone cloned their PC/AT series, Microsoft back-stabbed them in DOS and OS/2, Amdal and others cloned their mainframes, their AIX RS/4000 series lost out to Linux, IBM eventually migrated to Linux in order to survive. Remember Novel? They had a product called Netware that did file and print services for DOS and Windows machines. Until Microsoft developed Windows NT Server, and Linux had a SAMBA project to work as a file and print server for PCs. Novel was a giant, but not so much now. They migrated to Linux as well to survive. You will find that over 90% of incubator projects fail, and become Dotbombs. Of the 20 top billion dollar industries, only thee of them were incubator projects. That is because most of them don't have a valid working business plan. Almost all of them have a freenium model of the web site is free, and they sell advertising and sell user private info, but that isn't enough to work anymore. Many fail because they didn't do the research into seeing if the project is feasible, or if there is even a need for it in the market and how many people exist in that market. Most just go coding on day one, work 20 hour days, 6 days a week and burn themselves out with almost nothing to show for it in revenue. Once the seed money is gone, your employees walk out the door because you cannot pay them salaries anymore. Thus projects are half-finished, and they are in some programming language like Go that is too new to find enough programmers willing to work cheap to finish it. The three that became billion dollar companies basically won the lottery. Knowing computer science and engineering is great, but learn business management as well.