redstater

brakken said:

Any way you look at it, these companies are nasty. 
And stupid. 
They've had 16yrs to bring added value re Apple but just. Can't. Make.... it....,

Sure ... as if being the #1 software company in the world and the #1 Internet software company in the world doesn't add value. It even adds value to Apple products, as like 90% of Apple PC and mobile device users run Microsoft and Google software and services on them. But hey, feel free to keep fooling yourself about the competition. Except that they aren't really competition. Microsoft and Google are software companies. Their primary rivals are each other. Apple is a secondary rival for both, particularly as Microsoft has diminished the importance of PCs in favor of being a multi-platform cloud, enterprise and mobile company, again like Amazon and Google.

Herbivore2 said:

Both companies are headed into decline. Microsoft still has office as a stable source of revenue, but Windows is headed toward irrelevance. Google's moonshot projects are all costing huge sums of cash and providing negative returns while Facebook continues to develop a much better and more robust advertising model. 

If Apple can get their act together and provide unique content for iTunes while building out their own cloud services, they can potentially grow much more. Apple is now at the fore front of technology. Samsung and LG are leaders in certain aspects of building hardware, but Apple has access to them. 

If Samsung and LG decided to collaborate, they could drop Android and develop Tizen into a better OS. Since those two make the best hardware, they could drive the adoption of an alternative mobile OS. 

Neither MSFT nor Google are proficient in building hardware and both are going to find themselves out competed by those that do. It's already happening. 

Windows is headed towards irrelevance? When they have 90% of the total PC market? And Office is nowhere near their only stable source of revenue. Microsoft is the #1 enterprise software company and the #2 cloud company.

Facebook's growth doesn't much affect Google as they do not directly compete against each other and most companies advertise on both. Advertisers have been able to spend on five broadcast networks and a slew of cable channels - who all do directly compete against each other - for decades yet "there can be only one" between Facebook and Google? That's rich. Especially when you consider that Google is a search engine. So if Google goes away, who takes over as the leading search engine? Yahoo, who has been failing for years and is up for sale, with Google among the prospective buyers? Or Bing, which has had 4 name changes in its 8 years of existence and has never turned a profit?

And why would Samsung and LG collaborate? They have been bitter rivals for decades - long before Apple even existed - and in far more product lines than smartphones. Each one would rather the other be forced to exist the mobile business than work together. Also, Tizen could be the best OS in the world - and it actually is a good OS - but their problem will always be app support. Their first party apps and services are horrible and they would get absolutely no support from third party developers at all. If Microsoft couldn't entice developers to contribute to their app store, what makes you think that Samsung and LG could?

Google and Microsoft aren't proficient at building hardware because they are software companies. So, are all software companies going to disappear before hardware companies, or just Google and Microsoft? Also, just 10 years ago everyone was saying that software was the present and future and hardware was yesterday. The iPhone changed all that - for Apple anyway as IBM, HP, Sony, GE, Sharp and a bunch of other electronics giants are struggling and some no longer even exist - but for all we know 10 years from now the software companies will be back on top. It isn't that hard to imagine how: cloud computing and ultra-broadband networks could make hardware almost meaningless. With 5G offering 10 gigabit/s speeds, it will be possible to run most applications - not just apps but large applications - on remote servers and the device - whether it's a Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, VR or IoT - would just be for UI. But ultimately, all Microsoft, Google and the other software companies have to do is make good products on whatever hardware platforms exist. Microsoft has been doing that for 40 years and Google for nearly 20 and there is no reason to think that they are going to all of a sudden stop, just as people aren't going to all of a sudden no longer need application solutions on all that fantastic Apple hardware.