I went into this article expecting to get mad, but it's actually quite reasonable: just like how incredibly rare it is that Microsoft releases something as capital-i important as Windows, the odds are against companies one-upping the innovations that vaulted them into success. That doesn't mean they're destined to failure or even to obscurity: but innovation favors the young.
(Somewhat ironically, I think Google has consistently shown the highest level of daring and innovation, as seen from things like Project Loon and the things that could totally restructure a first-world society, like self-driving cars or Google Glass -- and yet, they have the highest peak to climb, as I don't think any piece of technology [besides maybe Wikipedia] changed the world quite as much as search.)
Same. Pretty decent. But it flogs its point a bit too hard. I find 'Peak' a bit of a 2004 buzz-word. I mean, the trinity the author speaks of are megalithic corps now on a downward trajectory. Agree with you that Google is the stayer. Page is streets ahead of Zuckerberg (Gates-lite) and Cook (a caretaker at best). The potency of Apple and FB will dissipate, but Brin and Page will remain fairly vitalic. One only has to look at the relatively Kurzweil hire to see that the Google spirit of old remains somewhat unfettered by the billions in loot.
Personally find the blogger's writing and ideas a bit second-rate, reaching out to the giants (Fukiyama, Moore) yet making no case for a reason not to "panic". As for his call for FB and Google employees to "exodus" and bring about change - seems rather mad and deluded. The shape-shifters are the hungry ones like Karp and Spiegel, not the Apple desk-jockeys and Facebook inner-circle.
Google dares. MS and Apple compete within their domain. Googles keeps on expanding its domain to solve the problems of other industries. MS and Apple are software / hardware companies. Google is a technology company.
Foolishly wrong about Google. Aside from G+, Google continues to do crazy new things--even if one is skeptical of Glass, one can't deny it's interesting.
And something like Facebook, with its artificially inflated value, cannot expand to advertise to everyone; it can only crash when its optimism runs out. He gets it right: it's only a place for sharing photos and links. We don't need Facebook for that, and we'll figure that out pretty soon.
Saying Facebook is just a place for sharing photos and links is like saying Google.com is just a place for looking up links.
You can understate it as much as you want but at the end of the day Facebook connects PEOPLE. Technology, whether it be Google, Facebook, or Apple, is about people and it seems to me you haven't figured that out yet.
Every single point of hard data and evidence says otherwise.
Facebook, in the past year, has increased every single metric of success; whether it be the amount of money it makes, the number of advertisers on the site, the number of users on the site, or the level of engagement from all age ranges. Every single metric has increased in all countries.
If you're getting your data and information from sensationalist articles which get thousands of hits just for mentioning Facebook, then you should look elsewhere to form a more accurate assessment.
Uh huh. Facebook connects PEOPLE by giving them a place to share photos and links. Butchers, restaurants, and NASA are all about PEOPLE but that doesn't mean you're saying anything useful.
Sure, but Google has the motivation and money to make it work on a massive scale, which arguably nobody else does. That's what innovative big companies are supposed to do.
"Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook
—generated most of the new ideas (at least the
mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum.
(If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into
the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks
well behind the other three.) "
I find this puzzling. What great new ideas have emerged from Facebook, exactly? It's just one of multiple very similar social networks that prevailed through better execution and marketing.
On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.
This is a deep fallacy. The amount of science and technology behind Google's prevalence is absolutely huge. Google prevailed through better search results, not through execution and marketing.
As someone who remembers just how dreadful search results were before google, I concur wholeheartedly. All the brilliant execution in the universe won't do you any good at all if no one wants to visit your site because your search results suck. Google was able to dominate because their far superior search results gave them lots of users to sell to advertisers.
Right and Facebook prevailed through being a technology company and having amazing engineers to make the technology scale. They just turned on their first data center outside of the USA (in Sweden). That datacenter is comprised of technology developed 100% by Facebook and it's 100% open sourced (including hardware). That's the power and innovation of a true technology company.
Myspace was never ever a technology company and neither were many of the competing social networks like Friendster. Facebook just built a better product. Just like Google did.
Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling me Facebook, who's killer app was photo tagging for the first 3 years of its existence and who has, over the last few years, been struggling with transitioning its platform to a mobile audience, somehow ranks ahead, technology-wise, of the biggest e-commerce site on the internet? The technology that goes into Amazon's logistics and distribution platform alone rivals facebook's impressive scale, and Amazon is doing that while, at the same time powering a gigantic and feature rich cloud service and methodically eating the publishing industry's lunch.
It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads.
Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up.
Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.
I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.
Firstly, Google has Glass, self driving cars, Google Fiber, Loon, and every single one of them has the potential to be the most significant thing of this century - though these are mentioned in the article, their potential is __highly__ underestimated. Its true some of them will (I prefer might) turn out to be duds, but definitely not all of them.
Secondly, all three companies make a conscious effort to be innovative. Sometimes they err on the side of innovation. And the smartest brains are still proud of working there. And until that changes, one can argue that with the recent deluge of startups that it has, they will continue to dominate.
And talking of AI, I guess almost all the leaders in the field are have a strong relationship with Google. Andrew NG, Sebastin Thrun, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil...
Or even release them as products. Or actively shutting them down (or attempting to). The mouse, their DRM language (as mal-conceived as it may have been, was pretty clean), Bob Metcalfe's Ethernet and bit-mapped windowing displays all come to mind. IIRC correctly there were some interesting experiments in object-oriented interpretive languages, their runtimes, dev environments and libraries (think about lessons learned from LISP/Smalltalk before Python/Ruby or Perl or even PHP)
As I recall they got something like an 8000% return on investment from all the money that went into PARC from the invention of the laser printer at PARC alone.
I disagree with the comment "If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks well behind the other three."
IMHO, Amazon is up there as an equal peer with G/A/F.
Edit: I agree with the rest of the article though. I expect (hope for?) more interesting things happening from small players, especially in non-USA markets.
Before the introduction of the Mac, peak Apple would've been in 1977 with the launch of the Apple II. Before the introduction of the iPod, peak Apple would've been in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh. Before the iPhone, peak Apple would've been in 2001 with the launch of the iPod. Before the iPad, peak Apple would've been in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone...
Exactly. Look at Apple's patent stream and tell me they have stopped trying to innovate. The author pans iOS 7, when in fact this is a good example of a company taking meaningful risks by throwing out the entire UX of the operating system for one that risks being a disaster in the name of a long term step forward. And for fuck's sake, Google is working on self driving cars and internet balloons. And lets not forget Amazon AWS releases insane disruptive technology every quarter and is on track to be the technology provider for all startups of this generation.
Basically we could be at "Peak Facebook", but to claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon's best days are behind them is at odds with reality.
iPod.
iPod smaller.
iPod much smaller.
iPod with a touch screen.
iPod with a touch screen and phone.
iPod with a touch screen, internet and much bigger.
iPod with a touch screen, internet and slightly smaller.
Some thinner, some fatter, some with cameras, some without.
I think Apple could still trigger another sea-change in yet another industry: banking.
Put a fingerprint scanner on every iPhone. Let people pay for things (or transfer money) with their phones instead of chip-and-pin bank cards.
They already have bank details linked to every Apple customer account, and they have enough cash to cover all capital requirements and insurance needs and fight lawsuits from protectionist rivals etc. People are wondering what apple are going to do with its money when the answer might be in money itself.
I'm not entirely sold on the "Innovator's dilemma" argument that "they can’t muster the courage to disrupt their existing revenue streams" in case of Apple - they seem to have been doing plenty of self-cannibalising since Jobs' return - Jobs slashed the numerous product lines to just 4 products when he returned; iPod Mini that cannibalised iPod sales, iPod Nano that cannibalised both of the mentioned, iPhone that cannibalised all iPods. They at least seem to be willing to compete with their own products.
42 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 96.4 ms ] thread(Somewhat ironically, I think Google has consistently shown the highest level of daring and innovation, as seen from things like Project Loon and the things that could totally restructure a first-world society, like self-driving cars or Google Glass -- and yet, they have the highest peak to climb, as I don't think any piece of technology [besides maybe Wikipedia] changed the world quite as much as search.)
Personally find the blogger's writing and ideas a bit second-rate, reaching out to the giants (Fukiyama, Moore) yet making no case for a reason not to "panic". As for his call for FB and Google employees to "exodus" and bring about change - seems rather mad and deluded. The shape-shifters are the hungry ones like Karp and Spiegel, not the Apple desk-jockeys and Facebook inner-circle.
And something like Facebook, with its artificially inflated value, cannot expand to advertise to everyone; it can only crash when its optimism runs out. He gets it right: it's only a place for sharing photos and links. We don't need Facebook for that, and we'll figure that out pretty soon.
You can understate it as much as you want but at the end of the day Facebook connects PEOPLE. Technology, whether it be Google, Facebook, or Apple, is about people and it seems to me you haven't figured that out yet.
Facebook, in the past year, has increased every single metric of success; whether it be the amount of money it makes, the number of advertisers on the site, the number of users on the site, or the level of engagement from all age ranges. Every single metric has increased in all countries.
If you're getting your data and information from sensationalist articles which get thousands of hits just for mentioning Facebook, then you should look elsewhere to form a more accurate assessment.
The company behind the Loon concept has been working on this for over a decade. http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Cont... Innovation on an existing idea, no doubt but
On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.
Myspace was never ever a technology company and neither were many of the competing social networks like Friendster. Facebook just built a better product. Just like Google did.
Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up.
Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.
Firstly, Google has Glass, self driving cars, Google Fiber, Loon, and every single one of them has the potential to be the most significant thing of this century - though these are mentioned in the article, their potential is __highly__ underestimated. Its true some of them will (I prefer might) turn out to be duds, but definitely not all of them.
Secondly, all three companies make a conscious effort to be innovative. Sometimes they err on the side of innovation. And the smartest brains are still proud of working there. And until that changes, one can argue that with the recent deluge of startups that it has, they will continue to dominate.
And talking of AI, I guess almost all the leaders in the field are have a strong relationship with Google. Andrew NG, Sebastin Thrun, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil...
And there were more. Many more.
And AdSense was largely an acquihire of Applied Semantics.
IMHO, Amazon is up there as an equal peer with G/A/F.
Edit: I agree with the rest of the article though. I expect (hope for?) more interesting things happening from small players, especially in non-USA markets.
Basically we could be at "Peak Facebook", but to claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon's best days are behind them is at odds with reality.
;]
Put a fingerprint scanner on every iPhone. Let people pay for things (or transfer money) with their phones instead of chip-and-pin bank cards.
They already have bank details linked to every Apple customer account, and they have enough cash to cover all capital requirements and insurance needs and fight lawsuits from protectionist rivals etc. People are wondering what apple are going to do with its money when the answer might be in money itself.