The Slow Demise of the Tech Cartel and Founder Opportunity
New megacompanies always begin during the darkest times
We’ve said it ad nauseam, so once more with feeling: no one stays on top forever.
Case in point: ChatGPT came along, and it appears that Google Seems To Be Outdated. Said Seeking Alpha, “The danger of disruption is real, and…overdue… Google has little interest in change and has hardly changed the cash cow apps for years...The apps that make money (Google and YouTube) are, in my opinion, not innovative; perhaps even the opposite…. For my taste, it is not user-friendly if the first 4 or 5 results contain only advertisements. Wasn't it supposed to be the principle that every searcher should get the best possible results?... Also, there is some censorship, and the algorithm seems to favor mainstream media. It looks like only certain views are permitted. The rest just don't show up in searches, at least not as top results.”
As Ignacio de Gregorio noted in Medium, “If we check Google’s quarterly results for Google in June 2022, Google managed to achieve an income of 69.7 billion dollars… out of the 70 billion in revenue… almost 60%, comes from one unique source, Search advertising, the industry where Google holds around 92% of the market share. And the problem is that this is, specifically, the market that AI can potentially disrupt forever.”
Even former darling and world’s most valuable company Apple’s Stock Is Losing Its Shine. Then again, when was the last time Apple truly innovated as opposed to collect tariffs on anything that came through the app store? Or resorted to squeezing more money out of current users? As TechCrunch reported, thanks to Reddit users, Apple is increasing battery replacement service charges for out-of-warranty devices. Plus, they track users, even when those features are turned off and they say they don’t.
Meanwhile, Meta's value has plunged by $700 billion. Wall Street calls it a "train wreck."
There’s been a definite downturn in tech et al, but one also has to wonder how much of it was self-inflicted and, note to founders and true disrupters, are we witnessing the beginnings of a sea change?
The time is here! The strongest companies emerge during downturns!
While the company had its own layoffs, which usually happens after an acquisition, Twitter has grown under Elon Musk — mainly in the U.S., data shows. Sea change. He certainly has shaken things up – innovated, some may say, by not suppressing information re releasing the Twitter Files and touching off a media firestorm as a result, and a new form of TDS - Twitter Derangement Syndrome. Overnight, Musk went from tech darling to demon.
Web 2 morphed into a surveillance economy, but it wasn’t simply about selling you more merchandise. If the Twitter Files are any indication – and there are internal memos to back up the claims – Twitter (et al?) were part of the government surveillance apparatus, with the FBI et al spying on the very citizens they were empowered to protect, and remunerating Twitter with taxpayer money (FBI paid Twitter $3.4M for doing its dirty work on users, damning email shows). Free? Seems we have been paying for it, and what a high price to pay.
Then there’s “Apple (who is) accused of supporting China's censorship’, according to NPR.
In case you’ve forgotten, Google staffers…had at least 427 meetings at the White House over course of Obama presidency - averaging more than one a week and Google currently employs at least 165 people, in high-ranking positions, from the Intelligence Community.
Huh???
As for the downturn, we have seen this before, when the Web 1 bubble burst and the then power players – The Yahoos!, AOLs et al – companies with greatly over inflated stock valuations - disappeared from the daily tech lexicon.
Now we’re witnessing the long-overdue bursting of the Web 2 bubble, due also in no small part to those companies’ failure to innovate. But also, people waking up to the fact that it’s not simply about our privacy being gone. It’s that while we have been the product, ad revenue aside, we’re coming to understand who has ultimately been the customer. Onward and forward.