We know that in the 15 years since the iPhone went on sale, technology has seeped into every corner of our lives. Technology has reshaped politics, industries, leisure, culture, and relationships between people, for better and for worse.
The march of technology has also come with this disconcerting reality: Hardly any technology from the iPhone era has been a runaway success.
I’d argue that only one smartphone-era consumer internet company has emerged as an undoubted winner in popularity and financial vitality: Meta, with its Facebook and Instagram apps.
(The company was founded in 2004, but I classify it as the iPhone era because Facebook really took off when smartphones did.)
Every other consumer internet company from the days of the iPhone gets an incomplete rating due to relatively small numbers of users, questionable finances, uncertain growth prospects, risk of dying, or all of the above. And even Meta is worried that she won’t stay healthy, like my colleague Mike Isaac wrote on Tuesday. Also, uh, Meta has contributed to some serious problems in our world.
I know this sounds ridiculous. In the last 15 years technology won all. How can there be so few technology companies that we can be relatively sure will last into middle age?
I am going to spend the rest of this newsletter presenting my case. Feel free to agree with me or shout (respectfully!) at [email protected].
First, I’m taking a big leap to exclude Google web search, e-commerce sites like Amazon and Alibaba, and Netflix streaming video from my review. They are probably enduring technological winners, but they belong to the first generation of the Internet. I’m also not counting the technology used primarily by businesses. I’m just looking at consumer companies that were toddlers or not yet born when smartphones first hit our pockets and whose popularity was then supercharged by those little supercomputers.
Beyond Meta, the most popular apps from the last 15 years have giant asterisks.
Billions of people use YouTube, but it’s not a big deal in relation to its size and influence. YouTube might not exist today if Google hadn’t bought the video site in 2006, a year before the iPhone came out.
Twitter is influential, but it is it is not widely used and is a chronic underperformer. Snapchat is a hotbed of creative ideas online and has been relentlessly copied by Meta and others. But it may not last, and it hasn’t shown itself to be a competent company. Uber and Spotify are two examples of good technologies that are bad businesses. They don’t consistently make a profit, and some astute tech watchers believe those business models just won’t work.
Trends in e-commerce Come and go. China’s ubiquitous apps like WeChat and Meituan will probably never go global. TikTok: We will see if its popularity lasts, if it can constantly earn money and if concerns about your chinese property will haunt the app forever.
Will these stars be from the iPhone era in 10 years, or will they go the way of Yahoo and Myspace? (For Gen Z readers, Yahoo and Myspace were popular websites not too long ago.)
That leaves us with Meta. Once again, the company is in trouble, but so far it has adapted several times to people’s rapidly changing online habits. The company is also very, very, very good at making money. Up to this point.
You can’t be a winner without the ability to turn popularity into money and keep people glued to an app as their tastes change. Very few companies have been able to do both consistently in the last decade.
How did it happen that we have so much technology and so few winning technology companies?
It is possible that the nature of the innovation simply leaves many roadkill behind. In earlier times of technology, perhaps only one or a few enduring companies emerged. Microsoft and Apple were the big winners in moving computers into people’s homes. Google, Amazon and Netflix were stars of the first generation of the web. There were many other technologies and tech companies that have been forgotten along the way.
And if you look beyond the technologies that people use for business, the last 15 years have produced more winners. Cloud computing, a shorthand for digital tasks performed over the Internet instead of specialized computers owned by individuals or companies, remade Internet services and corporate technology. Cloud computing has also made many technology companies rich, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
Emerging inventions in artificial intelligence, driverless cars, and technology that blur the lines between the virtual and real world can produce many flourishing technology companies. But that has not happened in the technological reality that exists today.
The Internet and smartphones were revolutions that changed the world. And the medium has been more durable and powerful than any of its parts.
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Before we go…
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Technology is still rich. There are also worry lines. Google Y Microsoft reported slower revenue growth than the companies had in a crazy 2021. But my colleagues reported that companies were mostly confident they could stay healthy as they face a weakening economic outlook and other troubles.
Counterpoint: Shopify, which helps businesses set up online stores, said so overestimate how long people would stick with the e-commerce habits they learned during the pandemic. Its financial results released on Wednesday they were horribleand Shopify said it would lay off 10 percent of your staff.
Read more from DealBook.
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Technology is changing the language even faster for ASL: My colleague Amanda Morris wrote about how video calls, smartphones, and social media have helped accelerate changes in American Sign Language. The evolutions, including tighter signs that fit on a small smartphone screen, have sometimes driven a wedge between generations of deaf culture, she wrote.
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Goodbye to the “ugh”: That’s the sound when a character dies in the virtual world of Roblox. But Roblox said on Tuesday that its signature sound was removed due to a “licensing issue,” video game news site Kotaku reported. Roblox fans started an online campaign to get the “oof” back.
a hug to this
A food festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia features a deeply strange oyster mascot called Pearl. The oyster shell mascot costume has at least 13 dark red eyes and lips. I’m lovin ‘it.
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