Facebook is the new AOL


Welcome to the Revenge of 90s Internet

By Nilay Patel on January 4, 2015 12:03 pm
theverge.com

Snip:

Google is the new Microsoft; Qualcomm is the new Intel

Google has been the new Microsoft for so long that this shouldn't surprise anyone: nearly everything that happens on the internet touches Google in some way, giving the company nearly incomprehensible power. It's way beyond obvious things like search and YouTube, each of which are behemoths in their own right — it's all the way down to Google's DoubleClick for Publishers ad server and Google Analytics, which sit behind almost every major website. (Like this one, for instance.)

Google knows so much about how people spend their time and money on the web that it can easily make or break any new businesses it wants. This power is so huge that European countries keep threatening to break Google up, just as Microsoft was constantly under regulatory threat at home and abroad. And Google's ever-increasing complexity means that it will eventually create opportunities for competitors with simpler, more focused products to come along and disrupt it, just as Google and the web disrupted Microsoft and Windows.

>>>THE COMING SENSOR EXPLOSION IS A DANGEROUS MOMENT FOR QUALCOMM<<<

But while the Google / Microsoft comparison is fairly obvious, no one seems to be paying attention to Qualcomm's incredible chipset dominance in mobile. Android and Snapdragon look an awful lot like Windows and Intel; every hardware maker except for Apple is beholden to the two giants behind the platform. (And even Apple uses Qualcomm's LTE radios and other chips in the iPhone.) Qualcomm has an incredible patent moat and it seems to be pushing Snapdragon along right on schedule, but that's exactly where Intel was before the smartphone explosion sent its roadmap spinning wildly off course. The coming explosion of internet of things devices, wearables, and other sensor-laden gadgets is a huge opportunity for every company that failed in mobile, and a dangerous moment for Qualcomm...