Despite the hype about disruption, the truth is most tech giants, particularly platform providers, are not so much displaced as they are eclipsed. IBM, for example, has been successfully selling and servicing mainframes for going on 50 years (although they are now in serious trouble (members-only)). During the PC era, though, they were eclipsed by Microsoft.
Mainframes didn’t stop being a viable business; it was just a much smaller business than PCs
The same happened to Microsoft: Windows still dominates PCs,1 and in all likelihood will for the foreseeable future (although there are certainly cracks in the foundation, a la IBM). The company isn’t going anywhere. PCs, however, have been eclipsed by smartphones, to the benefit of Apple (in terms of revenue and profit) and Google (in terms of market share).
PCs have in the past few years been eclipsed by smartphones. To see a similar graph with exact data, see this post by Benedict Evans
These eclipses are obvious in retrospect, but the truth is few if any could have predicted them before they occurred. PCs were thought to be a tremendous boon for IBM, and they did profit greatly until Compaq copied their BIOS leaving Microsoft all the leverage; similarly, Microsoft looked set to conquer mobile (which was why Google bought Android in the first place) before a resurgent Apple introduced the iPhone. In both cases it turned out that the incumbents’ prior success resulted in misdirected incentives: IBM focused on selling and servicing PCs, instead of building a platform, while Microsoft focused on extending Windows to mobile instead of the user experience. If you’ll forgive a war analogy, both companies won the battle but lost the war.
And so, if one wishes to predict who might follow in this illustrious but ultimately tarnished path, it might be useful to look for similar characteristics: the company should be dominant in its field, and the company should seem to have an advantage in a far larger adjacent field, but that advantage, on closer inspection, should prove to be just as much a hindrance as a help.
The clear candidate is Google.......MORE
HT: Beyond Search
