“Facebook is AOL of our time” or the 90s are back

At the very end of the 90s of the last century, some companies identified the main trends, directions of development of technologies, industrial design and communication systems. Then there were several influential players on the market, and some of them are still working (and quite successfully).

But the spheres of influence have changed a lot. Companies that have had a huge impact before now weigh no more than a feather. And the newcomers, who came to the IT market in the new century, took the place of the “old men”. Who is who in the modern world?

TheVerge journalists have made interesting parallels between the companies that occupied a prominent place before, and the companies that are heavyweights of the IT business now. Interestingly, even the mistakes that modern companies make are very similar to the mistakes made by their distant ancestors predecessors. Everything has its time, right?
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2015 can be called the year of the revival of the 90s: business sharks, media companies and technology giants form a strong tandem, the dominant players try to spread their influence everywhere, well, and ... platforms and portals everywhere.

Google is a new Microsoft. Qualcomm - new Intel

The fact that Google corporation has now taken the place of Microsoft should not surprise anyone: it’s just that Google can now be called a monopolist of the Internet market, because everything that happens in the networked world somehow concerns the "Corporation of Good". Google everywhere is YouTube, ad networks, and Google Analytics, a system for collecting statistics that is present on almost every site.

Google knows where and how people spend their time, what they spend money on. So for this company there is nothing difficult in offering business what it needs. The power of Google is so great that in Europe they were even frightened by this power, proposing to divide the corporation into two parts. Microsoft had about the same problems at the time, and the Redmond giant Google now eclipsed.

And at the same time, now few people pay attention to the growing power of Qualcomm, which is a leading player in the market of chipsets for mobile devices. Android and Snapdragon are about the same as Windows and processors from Intel in due time. True, there is Apple, which uses its own solutions, but even this company works with Qualcomm's LTE chips (and Apple also uses other chips). Qualcomm has a huge patent portfolio, like Intel had at one time. And the upcoming boom of connected device development, IoT, is a great opportunity for newbies, and a danger to Qualcomm.

Facebook - New AOL

Just think for a moment. Of course, Facebook is the new AOL. The social network Facebook is the beginning and end of the Internet. This is a combination of a service provider (user profiles, IM, work with photos) and a portal. Facebook has its own IM, just like AOL did. Not so long ago, Facebook bought another IM platform - WhatsApp, right, as AOL bought ICQ. Facebook groups are AOL chat rooms, there are other similar points.

Facebook's main business is the sale of ads in News Feed, which can be compared to the AOL dial-up business. Both businesses are as profitable as they are vulnerable.

Apple - new Sony

In the 90s, Sony, if I may say so, was the engine of progress. She set the tone for the development of industrial design, in relation to various devices - this company decided which technology would live and which should go into non-existence. Trinitron TV, Walkman, Discman, Mega Bass, VAIO, Clié, AIBO - all this was, these are technological icons of the 90s.

The only company that roughly repeats this path is Apple. The corporation manages to combine technology with software and design so that all this pleases the consumer, and he is ready to give his money. At one time, Sony did not pay due attention to the development of its software, and paid. Similarly, Apple is "stuck" with its services. They are not universal - Google is everywhere and everywhere, and Apple is taking its toll only because of the large number of gadget buyers. Apple software without Apple gadgets will be needed very few people.

The Internet of Things is a new digital hub

In the early 2000s (yes, not in the late 90s), devices that could connect to a desktop PC or laptop began to appear on the market in large quantities: MP3 players, digital cameras, printers, the first smart home systems and everything else. In this case, the laptop or PC was the central element of the entire system, and without this center nothing worked.

Now everything has changed: there are cloud services that remove the need for the physical connection of devices to each other. Mobile phones, tablets, smart watches and laptops - everything is always in touch with each other, without these inconvenient wires. And for some people, the use of flash drives today is as backward as the transfer of information using 5-inch floppy disks in the early 2000s. The clouds decide everything.

findings

In principle, many authors have written and are writing about the cyclical nature of development (civilizations, technologies, culture). It is all the more interesting to observe such cyclicality in the modern world of technology. Some analogies may be somewhat contrived, I agree. But as a whole - everything is as it is. And what do you think, what companies of the present and the past are (at least very approximate) analogues of each other?