This week’s TWiT touched on an interesting question after the news that IBM celebrated its 100-year (nuts, right?) anniversary: “which of today’s four dominant American tech firms will be around in 100 years—Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook? The consensus was Amazon. This is a favourite barstool debate of mine, so while I mostly agree with the panellists, I thought I’d expound a bit.
Google might seem like a pretty safe choice, but I’m not convinced. Although, long-run, maybe it gets broken up ATT&T-style. One of the best books I’ve read recently (apart from Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which I’m now recommending to everyone) is Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. I think he’d probably argue that Google is at the crest of its “empire.” It will almost certainly have anti-trust issues in the future. And despite its various cool skunkworks projects, it’s still a search company (that’s getting steadily less good at search) that makes all of its money on ads. May not look like it now, but Google is replicable.
Facebook? They got greedy. They wanted to be the new internet. And now American FB usage is declining for the first time. More instructive in understanding Facebook’s future, though, is the broad gut-level aversion to the way Zuck is now following all of us around the web. Everyone I talk to about this is figuring out their own way to circumscribe what Facebook knows about our lives and our online behaviour. And, by extension, circumscribe its reach. It will remain an important part of the social infrastructure of the web, and it will still have enough juicy data to be profitable, but as soon as an alternative comes around that feels like Facebook felt in 2006 (intimate, exclusive, and cool), it will cease to be the the hegemon of the social web.
Amazon has a good shot at being around for 100 years because its core business (online retail) will be around in a hundred years and changes in that market, like new competitors or new technologies, aren’t likely to kill ‘em dead. It’s hard to imagine how, barring some summer-blockbuster-aliens’n'asteroids-armageddon scenario, Amazon just goes away. It’s also easy to forget that Amazon is one of the best-positioned future purveyors of cloud services.
As for Apple, an Infinite Loop? Maybe not. Post-Jobs it will just go back to being a clever little consumer electronics company. A shadow of its former self, but still making stuff. Apple will be Sony. And in 50 years, somewhere in Cupertino there will be a museum dedicated to the aughts, when the world trembled bi-annually before each new buttonless slab of silicon and glass as though they held commandments, not angry birds. Maybe there’ll be a statue of Jobs somewhere…
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozy-jobs-ias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
No buttons remain.”

