8 ms·

I find it quite incredible that these days a company can go from a position of almost unassailable strength to total collapse in a few years. That too in a mark

by sheri 13y ago

I find it quite incredible that these days a company can go from a position of almost unassailable strength to total collapse in a few years. That too in a market that is booming rather than falling. Blackberry had over 50% market share back in the mid to late 2000's, and now is defunct. In India back in 2008 Nokia was king. Pretty much every phone was a Nokia phone, and now Nokia too is trying to claw back. Now that the smartphone market seems to have matured, do we expect to see the current market situation to remain relatively stable over the next decade or so?

tokenizer 13y ago
That depends on if there's any more massive paradigm shifts, and if those shifts are created by new players or not. My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants. That said, the crowdsourcing of Firefox and Ubuntu phones could potentially disrupt things a little longer come 2014.
- jonknee 13y ago
  > My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants. What does that have to do with anything? Samsung is the largest smartphone maker and you didn't even mention them. Xiaomi is likely to be a huge force in the next couple years. I'm sure there will be more.
  - objclxt 13y ago
    Samsung primarily make phones which run Google software, and unless Samsung want to do an Amazon and ditch the Google Play Services infrastructure for all intents and purposes they are Google phones. Samsung sells lots of phones: how many of those phones are running Tizen (né Bada)? I think the point the OP was trying to make is that it's highly unlikely we'll see a company collapse to the extent that RIM/BlackBerry did unless there's a major paradigm shift in mobile technology. Are Xiaomi going to be driving that? I'm not sure.
    - tokenizer 13y ago
      Exactly. I don't see current companies (including Samsung and Xiaomi) making enough of an impact to dethrone Apple or Google from their places unless one of these smaller companies can literally rival the touchscreen shift in market disruption.
    - jonknee 13y ago
      > for all intents and purposes they are Google phones ... Except in profits.
- twistedpair 13y ago
  Shift happens.
- mseebach 13y ago
  There are plenty of hardware players in the Android space. Samsung is ahead, it seems, but the last two Nexus devices are LG, and we probably haven't seen the full extends of what Google will do with Motorola yet. At the bottom end of the market, China is overflowing with dirt-cheap Android devices. In the software (App-store) space, Amazon is pretty aggressive about taking on Google. I can't say that I've heard of any of them, but Wikipedia list another dozen live third-party Android app-stores: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distribution_platforms#Third-party_platforms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distrib... It's hard to predict where the iOS ecosystem is going. It's definitely got momentum, but controlled, mono-culture ecosystems are vulnerable and iOS devices are definitely fashion-devices with all the fickleness that comes with that territory.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  "you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants" Exactly. You WILL see new players coming out of the woordwork with a new, post-phone device everybody wants. I'm not claiming I know what it is. But its emergence is a certainty.
rogerbinns 13y ago
You should read The Innovators Dilemma. This is a fairly common pattern - a company optimises for an existing customer base, what they value the most, and ends up with happy customers and good revenues/profits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma Some disruptors come in, and they are worse by the same things those existing customers value. They are often more expensive by the same measures. The existing company doesn't really do anything about it because the disruptors aren't of interest to the customers, nor is there sufficient profit to be made. But what those disruptors do different does end up being valued by some and eventually it becomes the mainstream market, and it is too late for the original company to catch up. The book uses hard drives as an example, and repeatedly the disruptors are smaller form factors with lower electrical consumption, with less storage space and higher $/mb costs. Blackberry was good at email, battery life and minimising mobile data traffic. The iPhone was none of those, and more expensive. But what it did better (especially web browsing) turned out to be more valuable. I highly recommend reading http://asymco.com http://asymco.com which follows the mobile industry and related spaces. It is strongly data driven with lots of graphs (ie a constrast to "opinion" sites). His research is that mobile companies suffering their first loss tend to die or get bought out in about two years http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/04/estimating-htcs-post-traumatic-life-expectancy/ http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/04/estimating-htcs-post-trauma...
- hga 13y ago
  Everyone should read The Innovators Dilemma (link to cheapest used Amazon merchant copies, the printing I read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0066620694/ref=tmm_pap_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=&qid= http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0066620694/ref=tmm_pa...) And as a matter of fact, his strongest example of disk drives, for which he had the best data, is a field I followed for most of the period he discusses, and he nails it as far as I can tell. But he also has other examples, e.g. hydraulic excavators defeating steam shovels---and at the denouncement you'll viscerally understand why--- or how Honda came over here trying to compete with e.g. Harley-Davidson and ended up taking a very different path. One thing to emphasize, and it's true for all these examples, is that the disruptors got their start serving new markets that the established companies couldn't, wouldn't or didn't even see a need to. But I'm not sure that's entirely to blame here: hasn't Blackberry suffered some terrible technical execution failures lately? Multiple well publicized crashes of their backend email systems? A tablet that couldn't do email without a nearby Blackberry cell phone, an amazing lapse who's cause is strongly rumored to be from being unable to write the necessary working software in time? See also some handset screwups elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669481
dredmorbius 13y ago
It happens. It's happening increasingly quickly now as compared with 20, or 40, or 80 years ago. The “topple rate,” the rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” are in a precarious positions. (Quoting Denning). Companies stay at the top of the heap for ever shorter periods of time. Similar statistics on residency in indices such as the DJIA or S&P 500 support this observation. The long-term decline in ROIC (return on invested capital) 1965-2009. From 6.2% to 1.3%. Though there've been some ups and downs, that's a very long-term consistent slide. And it's pretty much always been the case that technology companies, especially those that don't have deep and broad connections elsewhere, fall over fairly quickly. AT&T and IBM managed to get themselves deeply wedded into corporate and government fabric. Xerox and Land (the instant photo camera company) not so much. Consumer electronics has been pretty fickle, and Blackberry grossly overplayed its hand in the mid-2000s. More on the transition of businesses in the Shift Index: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-index-2011-the-most-important-business-study-ever/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-in... http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/08/defining-the-big-shift.html http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/0...
sirkneeland 13y ago
well, the current market situation for smartphones will be stable...but that likely means the cutting edge of innovation shifts to another frontier (which I think we are already beginning to see, as smartphone innovation plateaus and interest in wearables and IoT speeds up). I for one think it is entirely feasible that the smartphone itself could become a glorified cellular hotspot (a "dumb pipe" if you will), a hub connecting you and a personal area network of micro-gadget sensors and nearby displays to the Internet at large. In which case "where the value is" will once again shift from today's winners to tomorrow's winners. All glory is fleeting.

by sheri 13y ago

tokenizer 13y ago

That depends on if there's any more massive paradigm shifts, and if those shifts are created by new players or not. My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants. That said, the crowdsourcing of Firefox and Ubuntu phones could potentially disrupt things a little longer come 2014.

jonknee 13y ago
> My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants. What does that have to do with anything? Samsung is the largest smartphone maker and you didn't even mention them. Xiaomi is likely to be a huge force in the next couple years. I'm sure there will be more.
- objclxt 13y ago
  Samsung primarily make phones which run Google software, and unless Samsung want to do an Amazon and ditch the Google Play Services infrastructure for all intents and purposes they are Google phones. Samsung sells lots of phones: how many of those phones are running Tizen (né Bada)? I think the point the OP was trying to make is that it's highly unlikely we'll see a company collapse to the extent that RIM/BlackBerry did unless there's a major paradigm shift in mobile technology. Are Xiaomi going to be driving that? I'm not sure.
  - tokenizer 13y ago
    Exactly. I don't see current companies (including Samsung and Xiaomi) making enough of an impact to dethrone Apple or Google from their places unless one of these smaller companies can literally rival the touchscreen shift in market disruption.
  - jonknee 13y ago
    > for all intents and purposes they are Google phones ... Except in profits.
twistedpair 13y ago
Shift happens.
mseebach 13y ago
There are plenty of hardware players in the Android space. Samsung is ahead, it seems, but the last two Nexus devices are LG, and we probably haven't seen the full extends of what Google will do with Motorola yet. At the bottom end of the market, China is overflowing with dirt-cheap Android devices. In the software (App-store) space, Amazon is pretty aggressive about taking on Google. I can't say that I've heard of any of them, but Wikipedia list another dozen live third-party Android app-stores: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distribution_platforms#Third-party_platforms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distrib... It's hard to predict where the iOS ecosystem is going. It's definitely got momentum, but controlled, mono-culture ecosystems are vulnerable and iOS devices are definitely fashion-devices with all the fickleness that comes with that territory.
sirkneeland 13y ago
"you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants" Exactly. You WILL see new players coming out of the woordwork with a new, post-phone device everybody wants. I'm not claiming I know what it is. But its emergence is a certainty.

rogerbinns 13y ago

You should read The Innovators Dilemma. This is a fairly common pattern - a company optimises for an existing customer base, what they value the most, and ends up with happy customers and good revenues/profits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma Some disruptors come in, and they are worse by the same things those existing customers value. They are often more expensive by the same measures. The existing company doesn't really do anything about it because the disruptors aren't of interest to the customers, nor is there sufficient profit to be made. But what those disruptors do different does end up being valued by some and eventually it becomes the mainstream market, and it is too late for the original company to catch up. The book uses hard drives as an example, and repeatedly the disruptors are smaller form factors with lower electrical consumption, with less storage space and higher $/mb costs. Blackberry was good at email, battery life and minimising mobile data traffic. The iPhone was none of those, and more expensive. But what it did better (especially web browsing) turned out to be more valuable. I highly recommend reading http://asymco.com http://asymco.com which follows the mobile industry and related spaces. It is strongly data driven with lots of graphs (ie a constrast to "opinion" sites). His research is that mobile companies suffering their first loss tend to die or get bought out in about two years http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/04/estimating-htcs-post-traumatic-life-expectancy/ http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/04/estimating-htcs-post-trauma...

hga 13y ago
Everyone should read The Innovators Dilemma (link to cheapest used Amazon merchant copies, the printing I read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0066620694/ref=tmm_pap_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=&qid= http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0066620694/ref=tmm_pa...) And as a matter of fact, his strongest example of disk drives, for which he had the best data, is a field I followed for most of the period he discusses, and he nails it as far as I can tell. But he also has other examples, e.g. hydraulic excavators defeating steam shovels---and at the denouncement you'll viscerally understand why--- or how Honda came over here trying to compete with e.g. Harley-Davidson and ended up taking a very different path. One thing to emphasize, and it's true for all these examples, is that the disruptors got their start serving new markets that the established companies couldn't, wouldn't or didn't even see a need to. But I'm not sure that's entirely to blame here: hasn't Blackberry suffered some terrible technical execution failures lately? Multiple well publicized crashes of their backend email systems? A tablet that couldn't do email without a nearby Blackberry cell phone, an amazing lapse who's cause is strongly rumored to be from being unable to write the necessary working software in time? See also some handset screwups elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669481

dredmorbius 13y ago

It happens. It's happening increasingly quickly now as compared with 20, or 40, or 80 years ago. The “topple rate,” the rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” are in a precarious positions. (Quoting Denning). Companies stay at the top of the heap for ever shorter periods of time. Similar statistics on residency in indices such as the DJIA or S&P 500 support this observation. The long-term decline in ROIC (return on invested capital) 1965-2009. From 6.2% to 1.3%. Though there've been some ups and downs, that's a very long-term consistent slide. And it's pretty much always been the case that technology companies, especially those that don't have deep and broad connections elsewhere, fall over fairly quickly. AT&T and IBM managed to get themselves deeply wedded into corporate and government fabric. Xerox and Land (the instant photo camera company) not so much. Consumer electronics has been pretty fickle, and Blackberry grossly overplayed its hand in the mid-2000s. More on the transition of businesses in the Shift Index: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-index-2011-the-most-important-business-study-ever/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-in... http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/08/defining-the-big-shift.html http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/0...

sirkneeland 13y ago

well, the current market situation for smartphones will be stable...but that likely means the cutting edge of innovation shifts to another frontier (which I think we are already beginning to see, as smartphone innovation plateaus and interest in wearables and IoT speeds up). I for one think it is entirely feasible that the smartphone itself could become a glorified cellular hotspot (a "dumb pipe" if you will), a hub connecting you and a personal area network of micro-gadget sensors and nearby displays to the Internet at large. In which case "where the value is" will once again shift from today's winners to tomorrow's winners. All glory is fleeting.