Even in 2013 nothing lasts forever and this has been proved by history time and time again.

A Little History

It is an idea that comes from going through the magisterial tome of Paul Kennedy, The Rise $ Fall of the Great Powers. In this work Kennedy displays that none of the large empires or nation-states of history- Rome; France in either its Bonapartist or Bourbon manifestations; Britain in its colonial glory; the Dutch republican in 1700- succeeded in preserving its global superiority for long.

While you might be wondering what this has to do with technology, it offers us a helpful way to think about 2 of the great tech powers of the world. The first one is Apple, whose quarterly results saw a veritable stream of hysterical reaction paired with fevered speculation regarding its future.

Apple

The world has been hypnotized by the manner in which Apple has grown from a weakening computer manufacturer to a corporate giant that is now the most precious company globally with larger reserves than annual GDP of a number of countries. However, with the inexorable growthcurves the query on each critic’s lips is whether Apple has reached peak.

Facebook

The other world’s tech power is Facebook with its many users and is likewise the hub of much attention. Lately, the Mark Zuckerberg kingdom launched its newest deadly weapon named Graphic Search. This new tool is only an algorithm that gets information from within a person’s friend’s network and supplements the outcome with hits from Bing search engine of Microsoft. But reading some of its commentary you would think that the Facebook Corporation invented either a free pass to hell or a perpetual motion machine.

Are They Invincible?

What we should bear in mind as we deal with the latest overheated comments on Facebook and Apple is that nothing lasts eternally. If you have been around long enough, you should memorize a time that Microsoft was scary and dominant as these two corporations are today. A couple of decades later, Microsoft is still in the market, but actually it is an ailing giant money-making but not innovative anymore, trying to get a footing in the mobile, post-PC, cloud-based world.

While the eclipsing of Facebook and Apple is to be expected, the timing as well as causes of their final declines will be different. Apple’s current power is that it really makes things that people desperately want to purchase and on which the corporation makes large margins. The hardware business’ inexorable logic is that these margins will decline with increase in competition, hence, Apple will grow to be less gainful over the long term. Apple’s future will be determined by whether or not it can develop fresh, market-creating products like iPhone, iPad and iPod.

Facebook, on the contrary, makes nothing. It just offers an online service that, at the moment, people appear to value. However, for it to make money from the users and satisfy Wall Street residents, it has to be even more manipulative and intrusive. In other words, it is condemned to intrusive overstretch. This explains why, in the end, Facebook will grow to be a footnote in the internet history. In fact, just like Microsoft.

Jonathan has 2 main interests which are sports and technology, in particular social media and the online landscape. He works for Bang Online Marketing which provide SEO services to Perth businesses.