
Peak Google, Apple and Facebook - sanj
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2013/06/14/dont-panic-but-weve-passed-peak-apple-and-google-and-facebook/?single_page=true
======
eliben

      "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.

~~~
victoro
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
ryanmerket
Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different
beast.

~~~
victoro
Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in
tandem is equally impressive.

------
jmduke
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.)

~~~
l33tbro
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.

------
jezclaremurugan
No, it isn't. At least not for Google.

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...

~~~
doseofreality
Yes, and Xerox PARC also had a ton of smart people working on a bunch of
exciting futuristic projects at one point as well.

~~~
jsolson
... and completely failing to capitalize on more or less all of them, because
they didn't even try.

~~~
hyperbovine
You mean, like, not charging money for anything?

~~~
zArtLaffer
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)

And there were more. Many more.

------
abraxasz
Published the exact day Google announces his Loon Project? I can't say for
sure, but if this project is successful, I'd call it a major innovation...

~~~
throwaway10001
"I'd call it a major innovation..."

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...](http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Space_Data_Awarded_USAF_Contract_For_Near_Space_Communications_System_999.html)
Innovation on an existing idea, no doubt but

~~~
notahacker
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.

------
jballanc
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...

~~~
gfodor
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.

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mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
eclipxe
Agreed. AWS, Lab126...

------
pilsetnieks
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.

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Tycho
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.

------
jboggan
"Google is 15 years old and has 39,000 employees (54,000 if you count
Motorola), and its last major innovation — AdSense — was way back in 2003."

And AdSense was largely an acquihire of Applied Semantics.

------
nsns
But wouldn't any new innovator simply be bought by one of the three as soon as
it becomes successful?

~~~
nolok
Tell that to IBM

------
Helianthus
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.

~~~
onedev
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.

~~~
redwood
Fb's user experience has waned on a number of fronts... users of the site feel
the change and are losing interest.

~~~
onedev
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.

~~~
redwood
Average user engagement (for users who were on the site last year) is higher
this year? Really?

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throwaway10001
Break Microsoft up and divide any MSR ideas among the companies. No that's
innovation, but currently MS doesn't want to rock the Win /Office boat.

