Why the Facebook and Apple empires are bound to fall

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rpm

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History should teach us that for today's technology industry titans, the only way is down. Just ask Microsoft

Nothing lasts forever: if history has any lesson for us, it is this. It's a thought that comes from rereading Paul Kennedy's magisterial tome, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which he shows that none of the great nation-states or empires of history – Rome; imperial Spain in 1600; France in either its Bourbon or Bonapartist manifestations; the Dutch republic in 1700; Britain in its imperial glory – succeeded in maintaining its global ascendancy for long.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/27/facebook-apple-only-way-is-down
 
true and that is why Warren buffet does not invest in tech companies(IBM exception) as he cant predict what the industry is going to look like in 10 years and who the winners are going to be.Talking about empires ,somebody I knoew in uk, wrote a book about empires falling called breaking the code of history http://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/
 
ppl are realizing at last that nothing still is nothing, like the tech bubble showed several times already. you can add twitter and many other companies to facebook. apple is digging their own grave manufacturing an iphone in china for $40 odd and sell it for $699+. got no sympathy with apple or microsoft or facebook.

suddenly its ads all over facebook and there's no privacy any more. facebook also inflated their user numbers before listing and it backfired on them.

"It often seems as though Facebook’s main purpose is to remind us continually of how much we have chosen to share with the world about our online behavior—whether we realize it or not. The latest lesson along those lines comes from the social network’s new “graph search,” which sounds at first like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers. Like much of what Facebook (FB) does, however, it is also a warning sign: If you were counting on certain things about yourself staying not so much private as obscure or hidden from view, those days are effectively over.

For an example of what this means in practice, look no further than a new Tumblr blog started by London-based programmer Tom Scott, entitled “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” This also sounds somewhat dry and academic, until you take a closer look at some of the things that Facebook makes it trivially easy to search for—things like “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran” (where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death) or “family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong,” the latter being a religious group whose members are routinely persecuted."

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-24/you-cant-hide-from-facebook-graph-search
 
jambai said:
true and that is why Warren buffet does not invest in tech companies(IBM exception)...[/url]
Click to expand...

IBM has a conservative grey suite attitude, they just quietly get on with things in the background.
 
mika1000 said:
ppl are realizing at last that nothing still is nothing, like the tech bubble showed several times already. you can add twitter and many other companies to facebook. apple is digging their own grave manufacturing an iphone in china for $40 odd and sell it for $699+. got no sympathy with apple or microsoft or facebook.
Click to expand...
And by that you mean $207 and $649 respectively?
 
I don't see what the big deal is (unless you are an investor) when Apple, Facebook or Google fails it will be replaced by something newer and better. Win for the users.
 
Article makes sense. Apple has to continuously releasing major hit after major hit or it declines super fast. History has shown us this.
 
They will only go "down" if they don't innovate / release. M$ went "down" (and this is my opinion) because they released ****ty software and tried to force standards and technology on us like they were a sovereign entity dictating our lives. They paid dearly for that (and in some instances) still do.

Since Apple, M$ started shifting quite dramatically, all their devices/OS's are talking to each other etc, so I'm thinking they'll go "up", even if it's just for a while
 
I wish I could really see some evidence of Microsoft going 'up' from their recent quarterly announcement (2.7% sales gain and 16% free flow cash margin). It would be hard to argue that they are stemming their fiscal decline, and I'm not sure what in their current portfolio indicates that they will ever turnaround.

The market is definitely taking a position of consensus belief that Apple has also entered a period of irrevocable decline. I just can't see it in the numbers. Supply constraints were a major factor for their numbers coming in lower than analyst projections; and any company would LOVE for the biggest problem being an inability to meet demand.
 
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