Tech Giants Can Decay and Die Too

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Matthew Lynn, down in New Zealand, waxes whimsical about Yahoo! going into the crapper sooner than later and the possibilities of Amazon and Apple following suit. Put a fork in it? Yahoo! meet Kodak?

The latest, Marissa Mayer, arrived with great fanfare from Google but, despite lots of initiatives, has never managed to get it growing again. With break-up predators circling, a sale, either as a whole or in parts, now looks the best option.
 
This can easily happen to current tech giants. I could see a Hulu get absorbed by another company if they lost the license to broadcast some of their best hit shows. Why does ESPN endure? I could see a web startup taking their market share. NFL just experimented with livestreaming games and received universal praise from the fans and owners. Personally I'd rather just tune into a paid Youtube stream to watch the game and chat with other fans a la Twitch. Amazon is convenient to shop at; I could care less about their other web services. The video thing is nice to have, and books are awesome; but those are not the reason that I visit Amazon. I'm finding that the more specialized the item I want, the more overpriced it is on Amazon.

Google is our modern day Henry Ford. Keeps the bread and butter business operating at a high level, and innovating through the years by trying new things. They have the best chance to be around for an 100 year anniversary. Amazon does also, but not nearly to the extent that Google does. Well not in the same fields that I like.
 
When was Yahoo ever that great or powerful a company? Sure they got some search-engine crumbs when Altavista crumbled, and I remember some commercials maybe 15 years ago, but Google's been beating them every step of the way from the very beginning.
 
Apple following suit? Apple can make 0 dollars for decades to come and still be around. They are sitting on a literal mountain of cash.
 
Apple is stagnant, but trickmonkey is right. They have the capital to change drastically or play a long game.
 
IMO, it comes down to management 101 :

It's easy to manage people and resources when money is coming into a company. Management could be a bunch of untrained monkeys and still look like geniuses.

Planning for the future and managing people and resources when money gets tighter is when company management show their true skill, and also shows if company politics are killing the company from the inside out.
 
Although this is a risk for any business, I think the concerns over Amazon are overblown. Amazon invests large amounts in growing their business and that is the main reason they are unprofitable. I would not expect either Amazon or Walmart to fail anytime soon as they are starting to reach the too big to fail levels. Apple as a consumer products company has to be constantly aware of their competitiveness and market trends. Given their big pit of money I think they have the brain power to reinvent themselves, if needed. Yahoo's main issue was the diversity of their product. Their strongest offering was their email product. Everything else they were not as competitive with the various other companies providing similar services.
 
I read recently that Yahoo is still the #3 portal when measured by web hits. They are still a major player on number of email users but since their product is just as script laden and based on data mining as the rest, they have no real draw to attract new users. Now if they were to offer a premium email product that was truly ad and 3rd party script free for a reasonable price, they might just find a good cash flow. But they have no chance to out data mine google or out stream netflix. And they already tried pairing with a major ISP (AT&T) and that just delayed their decay.

I wonder what happens to all of the AT&T users that still have Yahoo as their primary email if Verizon wins the bidding war?
 
Well shit, this person gets it.

Great article. This is precisely where Comcast is heading as well.

And also why all the 1% nonsense is exactly that.
 
If Yahoo! goes away, what homepage will I be able to use to demonstrate the raw processing power of my computer?
 
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