Re: 'tell us the 'data-monster' dies'
It'd be great to imagine Fake-News killing off Google & Facebook.....What will it take?
"It's just that Google was in the game, at a time when others didn't realise what the game was."
I'm a long- experienced business strategist by trade and in this quote Mr Orlowski nails EXACTLY how companies win in formative and evolving markets, not just tech, any evolving market. Not by being clever, just by being quick, organised and willing to take well judged commercial risks. But this is also how Google & FB will eventually lose, just as Microsoft lost the phone war, the tablet war, and many other wars.
Dominant players get complacent, nothing new ever matches up to the scale and glory of their core business, it never gets the resources, energy, effort. And, in a dominant business, even for new products nobody ever has the hunger of the new kids, who live or die by their efforts. New ventures need multiple approvals from middle and senior managers who are incumbents, and see no value in attaching their name to possible failure. Look at how the old Motorola (pre-Google) struggled and failed to innovate, and the original V3 had to be developed in secret to stop it being crushed by the bureaucracy. Nowadays, these big companies promote ideas like "fail fast" and internal incubators - yet those all fail because they're still part of that dominant player, who no longer needs to, or can, innovate. Google trial lots of new things, yet look how they failed so spectacularly in social media, precisely because they didn't realise what the game was until it was over.
Sometimes companies win, and then lose, because surviving and growing is a different to winning the market in the first place. Friends Reunited, for example, or perhaps even AOL. Look at how Tesla have won the premium EV market, whilst the motor industry sat on its arse, most not knowing what the game was, or thinking that it hadn't yet started. In that case, although Tesla have already won, there's further separate battles that I think they will lose - that they won't scale the business successfully, or be able to capitalise and build on their current winning position. But Tesla will probably live on in name, and will be fondly remembered as the company who defined the EV as a desirable, attractive car with great performance, decent range, and widespread charging support.
Almost by definition, big companies lose because, like an elderly jaywalker, they simply don't see the fast car that wipes them out. So it will be with Google, Facebook. They won't go quickly or quietly, but they won't have anywhere to go as something most people won't see until it's done makes their core platform a lower value, low growth operation.