Fred Wilson: By 2020 Apple Won’t Be A Top-3 Tech Company; Google, Facebook Will

It takes a special kind of investor to have lost money in AAPL in 2009, a year where the stock more than doubled. Fred Wilson is that investor.<p>So consider the track record.

Apple detractors keep predicting its downfall due to availability of commodity hardware, however Apple fans continue to purchase Apple gear because everything else <i>is</i> commodity hardware.

PCs have been a commodity for more than a decade now and Apple is still selling Macs at good margin. I think for Apple they like to view their hardware as part of a experience which includes iOS,App store,retail stores and of course the Apple brand itself. As long as they can move meaningful number of devices to be relevant like Mac i think they will be fine. May be not top 3 tech company but i don&#x27;t think Apple should care about those things.

From a guy who dumped AAPL @ $97 5 yrs ago. And exactly 12mos later Steve Jobs showed up to present the iPad (and iPhone4, Macbook Air...later on). I thought the core value of a good VC is seeing the big trend, along with seeing the financial potential.<p>Source:<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/c/536798b6eab8eaa7579683e0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;536798b6eab8eaa7579683e0</a><p><a href="http://avc.com/2009/01/selling-apple-a/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;avc.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;01&#x2F;selling-apple-a&#x2F;</a>

I switched to Apple products completely, because the UI and experience is _much_ better. In my opinion Google is the company whose UI really sucks. For example try Google Maps today. It is a great product but when you click on any point of interest, you will get a large popup on the left, that covers 1&#x2F;3rd of the screen. You won&#x27;t be able to see the map anymore. The same kind of dysfunctional UI philosophy is spread everywhere in Google products (see how the dial pad on Android vanilla UI is made smaller, and hard to use, for sake of writing more details to confuse the user). See how google contacts on an Android phone contain all contacts thrice, and mostly irrelevant because they are imported from gmail.<p>I know it sounds a bit one-dimensional to discuss who will be the &quot;top tech company&quot; with UI or user experience differences, but that is ultimately what made me pick one product line instead of the other.

Why does he think Facebook will survive? Given the lack of concern it has for its users it&#x27;s more likely to be the next MySpace.

Re Apple, I get his point about their cloud offering sucking and hence they are losing out on the biggest trend. But Apple is also hyper-focused on user-experience and design, which is a huge strength.<p>What I really don&#x27;t get is his claim that Facebook will be one of the top 2 tech companies? Really?! Why? Because they are riding the cloud wave?!! FB, the social network itself is so ready for disruption that I believe it&#x27;ll be dethroned just as easily as MySpace was. It&#x27;s just a matter of someone figuring Social Network 3.0.

&gt; by 2020, the biggest tech company in the world — Apple — will cease to be the most important, and won’t even be in the top three....he predicted that the top three tech companies, instead, will be Google, Facebook “and one that we’ve never heard of.<p>Okay, a couple of questions here:<p>1. Is Apple the top three most important company even right now? Don&#x27;t mistaken me, I love Apple.<p>2. Like many doubters here, I wonder if Facebook can even be relevant in 2020. Google succeed because it does not limit itself to its original service (searching) and created tons of other cool services that a lot of people want. The question is whether Facebook can pull that off? Not yet at least.<p>3. If there is some company beating Google I am thinking of a company in AI with some tech breakthrough. But then the question is, would Google have enough smart people to &quot;copy&quot; it and make it better? I am somewhat awed at what Google can achieve at this moment. Next Google please comes up.

A VC who invests in software predicts that hardware will become a commodity.<p>I hope he&#x27;s wrong. Cheap commodity hardware is such a pain over the long term. Plus, a desire for quality goods bodes better for US manufacturing.

My bet is that Google and Amazon will come out on top. My thesis on each of the big 4:<p>Google: Some investments in Google X and other technologies will pay off and Google revenue stream mix will change. Size of pay-off will offset or eclipse current ad revenues.<p>Amazon: Revenue growth will continue for the foreseeable future. They are still a tiny fraction of their addressable market, and have a humungous moat. Amazon will achieve profitability not by raising prices, but by squeezing suppliers (a la Walmart).<p>Facebook: Zuck does not think the best use of capital is reinvestment into core Facebook (see investment in WhatsApp + Oculus). That&#x27;s fine, but has no track record of success with this. Oculus is very promising, but I was much more excited about it when it was a standalone company and John Carmack et al were equity compensated. The addition of Abrash is exciting though. I think this could be Facebook&#x27;s Youtube if they play it right, but still not going to change Facebook&#x27;s 5yr+ trajectory.<p>Apple: I largely agree with Fred Wilson about commodification of hardware.

I don&#x27;t agree with the premise of the article.<p>That said, Apple has done something that really alienated me: no iTunes support for Android, like they provide for Windows.<p>I had my music set up very well using Apple&#x27;s paid service, then discovered that I was out of luck on my Android phone. A sister in law hit the same problem, bought an Android tablet and had no easy access to her years of iTunes purchases. It is on my todo list to export thousands of songs for her to the Amazon Music Cloud.<p>So, I now use Amazon for music, Kindle, and Audible books. I also really like iTunes and Apple&#x27;s eBooks, but they lost me as a customer by not supporting my Android phone. I use mostly Apple gear, but it is fun having an Android phone for that different experience.

Some are suggesting here that we ignore Fred Wilson because he sold his Apple stock in 2009. Does this mean your opinion is invalid if you&#x27;ve ever been wrong? I have a word for people who are never wrong - lucky.

This seems wrong from an engineering AND MBA point of view. As designing and manufacturing electronics becomes more automated, the workflow for designing computer hardware will be very similar to software development (it pretty much already is).<p>From an MBA perspective, Apple just owns more of the value chain in software, i.e. some of the silicon via the mobile processors, and the proprietary cases. Other than that, most of the hardware follows pretty closely with the industry standard tech [intel&#x27;s roadmap]. They don&#x27;t seem excessively tied up at all.

The only prediction of his I find interesting is the Twitter one. I think he&#x27;s extremely far off base. Twitter won&#x27;t be a top 30 tech company by 2020, they&#x27;ll barely be relevant at all. They&#x27;re losing steam now, and it&#x27;s going to accelerate dramatically over the next few years. Twitter failed at its original mission: to be a communication platform. Mostly it&#x27;s a one-way celebrity gawking platform. WhatsApp, Snapchat, and numerous others accomplished what Twitter was supposed to be, but never became, and in the process they&#x27;ve made Twitter nearly pointless. In another six years, 140 characters will be viewed as a curious absurdity; teens in 2020 will laugh when they realize it derives from limitations on messaging from the pre-smart phone era 15 years prior. You&#x27;ll know Twitter is sinking rapidly when they lift the 140 limit out of desperation.

Apple surprisingly remained in its mindset from the 90s. Such backwards things like using proprietary ports in the age of ubiquitous USB really explains Apple&#x27;s way of thinking. I.e. complete lock-in, no interest in system portability and etc. While it served them well in the past, it can also be their downfall in the future.

What prevents software and services from becoming commodities as well?

Oh, for sure. They&#x27;re doomed! Everybody knows that.