Learn from history, or be condemned to repeat it.
- Why did GroupOn, Yahoo and MySpace die, while AirBnB, Google and Facebook thrived?
- How did Apple come back from the dead in 2000 to become the world's most valuable and profitable company?
- Why did Korean companies - Samsung and LG - emerge as a leader in mobile phone manufacturing in the early 2000s?
This course seeks to answer questions like this. The technology industry is incredibly fast-moving. Companies and trends that were dominant in 2011 don't even really exist any more. Yet through all of the changes in the past two decades, some recurring patterns emerge. This course quickly studies the past two decades, and summarizes some key trends. It rounds off with some specific ideas on how an individual - or a company - can deal with these trends.
- 1994 - 2003: Surfing and portals and display ads define the internet, as epitomized by Yahoo, MSN and AOL
- 2003 - 2008: 'Search-Find-Obtain' is the way folks use the internet; Google and Amazon are the big winners
- 2005 - present: China's tech usage patterns diverge significantly, and giants such as Alibaba and Tencent emerge
- 2008 - 2012: Smartphone usage explodes; Apple gets it right and becomes the most valuable company in the world
- 2012 - present: 'Share-Discover' becomes the dominant usage pattern; Facebook, Uber and AirBnB are big winners as users become comfortable with
- 2008 - present: Winner-takes-all is the norm - both for companies (the big 5 tech firms get bigger and more profitable) and for individuals (social mobility declines in many countries)
Viewed with this context, the big trends of today - Big Data, Cloud Computing and Machine Learning all make sense.
