
2016’s Business Winners and Losers - jfdimark
http://www.swotnot.com/2016s-business-winners-losers/
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akanet
_It’s hard to read the tech news without coming across a Google-related story
each day, and usually with a positive slant_

 _the MacBook Pro was widely parodied_

This reads more as a summarization of 2016 press sentiment than a rigorous
analysis of whether companies are "winning or losing". How many Pixels did
Google sell? How many MBPs did Apple sell?

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jfdimark
There are actually plenty of references in there to publicly available numbers
such as revenues, profit etc. and links to plenty of original data points, but
for ease of reading I've mostly added them as links rather than lots of data.

That being said, I take your point there isn't data available to back
everything up (as you'll know, companies are pretty selective about releasing
some data points), and so I've leant more on press sentiment in those cases.

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hammock
It seems no one in the comments, even OP, seems to understand how this type of
list works. It's not based on sales or a hard metric. It's just based on the
zeitgeist, "the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history."

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darkmagnus
He is putting apple in the same category as twitter, yahoo and theranos.
Really? At this point it is becoming cliche to predict the demise of Apple.

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jfdimark
I would argue that theirs was not a stellar year, and imho their momentum
stalled relative to other tech giants.

So hence they ended up in the 'losers' column.

Of course that doesn't mean they had quite as terrible year as some in the
list...but for ease of reference it's a binary list rather than a gradient.

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xapata
When I read an analysis paper, I find it more convincing if the dependant
variable is continuous rather than binary. It's too easy to find spurious
statistical "significance" otherwise. The heuristic holds up here as well.

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donmatito
Good list, makes sense actually. The come-back of Microsoft, and what they
seem to have in store (MS Teams, Hololens) is particularly impressive.

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ChuckMcM
Sad that there are either "winners" or "losers" and no "treading water" but
I'm guessing if they aren't mentioned they are in the treading water space.

But the other challenge is what is captured here is not an object measurement
instead it is "performance against expectations" which makes people like Apple
a "loser" even though they shipped more product and made more money than
Google a "winner."

The EVP of marketing at NetApp used to have a chart on their wall which had
all of NetApp's competitors and an arrow next to it, which was their "path"
and the path could be up, forward, or down. It had a similar feel. It is
useful as a leading indicator of future challenges. And by that I mean that
you can miss expectations one year and be fine, but miss for 2 or more years
in a row, or regularly have a miss every few years, and its harder to be
perceived as the leader.

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guard-of-terra
Google is winner? What do they do now? I don't remember being excited about
their product for a long time. 2008 if you exclude Android. Seriously. Gmail
inbox partitioning was a good thing.

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scriptproof
I would credit driverless car as a success of Google, imitated by many. They
have failure too, fiber for example, and Google Plus. Microsoft had also the
big failure of Nokia phones, the results are mixed actually.

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BigChiefSmokem
I wouldn't give any credit to Google with regards to driver-less cars. Tesla
actually has product and software out on the market and infrastructure to
support their ambitions.

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oli5679
An highly relevent metric to include would be annual net return vs industry
benchmarks. It directly describes the changes in investor sentiment about
future profitability, rather than relying on subjective assessment of the
average tone of press coverage. Change in revenue, gross and net profit are
also informative metrics, directy measuring change in current market-share and
profitability.

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millxing
While not perfect, the 2016 stock return relative to that of other technology
companies is a good baseline for assessing who was a winner and who was a
loser. 2016 equity performance is an excellent indicator of how NEW
information impacted the long term prospects of these companies relative to
consensus expectations.

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kriro
Based on Zeitgeist I'd say Palantir was a huge winner. Sadly, I feel the shift
towards way more surveillance is only a matter of time in many European
countries. All ethics aside, If I had to pick one company where all my money
went it would be them.

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adamnemecek
No mention of AMD and Nvidia both of which have grown 3+x over 2016. It makes
sense, they are the Levi Strauss' of deep learning (in that they are selling
shovels during a gold rush).

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blauditore
This reads like a sports news flash.

Not sure if this is good or bad, just an observation.

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pmontra
The site itself is not much of a winner: the text is right there inside the
HTML body but it's invisible unless JavaScript is turned on. What for?

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X0nic
Do you really browse without JS turned on? Seems like a hopeless cause now
adays.

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pmontra
Many sites work. I don't disable js in the preferences, that would be really
hopeless. I use noscript and enable the scripts that make enough of the site
work. There are obvious tracking scripts that I never enable. It's interesting
to see the amount of cruft attached to many sites just to track people.

