“Fred Wilson of New York’s Union Square Ventures, one of the top tech investors around, believes that 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,” Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch. “Speaking at today’s TC Disrupt conference in NYC, he predicted that the top three tech companies, instead, will be Google, Facebook ‘and one that we’ve never heard of.'”
“Why? Apple, he believes, is ‘too rooted to hardware,’ with not enough tied into the cloud, and that will make it too much of a challenge for it to evolve going forward,” Lunden reports. “‘I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity,’ he said. ‘Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don’t think they think about data and the cloud.’ Twitter, meanwhile, he thinks will be ‘four, five, six, seven… but I’m not sure it will be number-two [or three].'”
“It’s surprising to think that the tables could turn so dramatically in, effectively, six years. It wouldn’t be the first tech company to drop out in value even if it holds mindshare,” Lunden reports. “Speaking to Michael Arrington on stage, Wilson said he had no idea what will occupy number-three in Apple’s place, ‘I sure hope that I’m an investor,’ he added.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Siri, remind us to run a top-of-the-site article on January 1, 2020 that very clearly reminds Fred Wilson of his proclamation. Thanks.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “boecherer” for the heads up.]