Innovations Rise and Fall: 8 Major Tech Takeovers

Finding success in the tech industry involves a mix of factors: entering the right market at the right time, pioneering new changes, establishing dominance, and expanding potential and possibilities in the field. Even for those at the top, long-term success is not guaranteed, especially in a highly competitive industry.

We will look at major innovations that have significantly impacted our daily lives – so much so that they have become “household names” – and how their predecessors lost out to successors in their quest for dominance in their respective fields.

The following 8 comparisons will illustrate the circumstances surrounding the fall of the predecessors and the rise of the successors. The factors and reasons differ for each case, and for some, the tables could still turn at the last minute. Nonetheless, this gives us insight into the complexities of decision-making, which, in many cases, can make or break a business.

Windows vs Macintosh

Windows vs. Macintosh is a classic example of a successor triumphing over its predecessor. Back in 1979, after being inspired by a demonstration from Xerox PARC on Graphical User Interface (GUI), Steve Jobs took the idea and, together with Steve Wozniak, created the Macintosh Operating System (Mac OS). The result was an undeniable commercial and technological success.

Having witnessed the commercial success of Macintosh, Bill Gates from Microsoft further developed his own GUI for the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) and released it as Windows in 1985. Although Windows didn’t see success until version 3.0, which featured a better design and more features, Windows offered something that Mac OS didn’t: openness.

Windows could be licensed to hardware developers as the primary OS for their computers, whereas Mac OS was only available as a bundle with its designated hardware.

Because it could be installed on any computer, Windows appealed to people of various income levels, dominating the OS landscape in the PC market and eventually capturing over 90% of the market share today.

Google vs Yahoo!

In 2009, former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz declared that Yahoo! was never a “search” company. Until 2003, the core of Yahoo! Search was a huge directory with a searchable index of pages. Needless to say, the search engine was not nearly as accurate as Google’s self-automated crawler bot, which was armed with the PageRank algorithm focusing on link relevance and authority above all.

Although Yahoo! made efforts later with tech acquisitions, it was just too little, too late. Yahoo! failed to recognize the shift early enough, likely due to the company’s conventional business strategy that emphasized advertisers. Yahoo! didn’t change, but the world did. In the age of Web 2.0, users were fast becoming the primary source of profit.

Yahoo!’s anti-innovation management culture also indirectly pushed talented individuals to join its rival company, leading to a failure to innovate and create better products. The chain of consequences resulting from poor business decisions explains why Yahoo! was overtaken by Google. As of July 2013, Google holds 67% of the market share compared to Yahoo!’s 11.3%.

Facebook vs MySpace

MySpace was once the king of social networking sites in the US, reaching its peak in 2006 when it surpassed Google in terms of site visits. It generated $800 million in 2008 and contributed to the success of mobile game company Zynga. Everything was going smoothly until Facebook came into the picture.

It was perhaps just a matter of time before the inevitable happened to MySpace. After all, it was merely a clone of another social networking site called Friendster. To make matters worse, in recent years MySpace focused intensely on generating profit, to the extent that they had lost sight of what’s truly important for a social networking service: helping users connect with each other better.

Eventually, the site slowed down and became cluttered with intrusive display ads and blinking GIFs, effectively pushing users to look for a better alternative, which turned out to be Facebook. MySpace had declined to acquire Facebook for (a mere) $75 million in 2005.

Three years later, in 2008, Facebook matched MySpace in terms of unique global site visitors every month. Since then, Facebook has gone from strength to strength with 1.15 billion active users as of July 2013.

YouTube vs Vimeo

Vimeo was founded in 2004, a time when video sharing was still in its infancy. Although Vimeo’s founders foresaw its potential, they were more concerned with the legal trouble they could get entangled in: copyrighted material. Vimeo was launched with strict rules to prevent users from uploading any potentially copyrighted material. Viewed largely as a side project by its founders, it was also not allocated much cash flow for storage and bandwidth.

YouTube, on the other hand, is a totally different story. It was well funded by venture capital and had much lower legal thresholds for video uploaders. Its influence was strengthened later when it was acquired by Google. Eventually, YouTube overtook Vimeo and became the number one video-sharing site you frequent today.

However, unlike the other cases we’ve discussed so far, Vimeo’s decision to protect its core business was a step in the right direction. On the other hand, YouTube, even after being acquired by Google, is still trying to find a way to profit without relying on external investment. So, perhaps getting to the top is not always as good as it seems.

Chrome vs Internet Explorer

Browser wars have always been one of the fiercest tech battles of our time. Internet Explorer once reigned supreme with a whopping 95.97% of the market share back in 2002 because it was pre-integrated into Windows. Despite overtaking Netscape Navigator as the dominant web browser, it was full of security bugs, and worst of all, it stopped improving beyond IE6.

Mozilla Firefox and Opera entered the market, but neither did much damage until Google Chrome came along. Within five years, Chrome had overtaken Internet Explorer in both performance and web standards support, while IE struggled to shift its user base to its latest versions, thanks to its monopolistic bundle strategy.

As of the latest data, Chrome has a significant usage share, while Internet Explorer’s share has continued to decline. Internet Explorer’s dethronement carries a valuable lesson: releasing a flawed product just to outpace your competitors will doom you for years.

HTML5 vs Flash

In April 2010, a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining the ban of Flash on the iOS platform was published. This ignited a heated battle between HTML5 and Flash, a war so intense that Flash was later hailed as a prime feature for non-iOS smartphones.

What’s so wrong with Adobe Flash, the technology that has powered interactive websites since the dawn of the Internet? For Steve Jobs, it was security, performance, and reliability issues, and incompatibility with mobile devices. Additionally, Adobe failed to improve Flash fast enough. Upgrades kept getting delayed. Whenever a security bug was discovered, developers could do nothing but wait for the next release.

All these pitfalls made developers jump ship and crown HTML5 as the leader of the next era of web interactivity. After 1.5 years, Adobe announced that they would halt the development of Flash player for mobile, literally marking the end of the Flash era on the smartphone platform.

Android vs iOS

Android vs. iOS is much like the story of Windows vs. Macintosh, except that it’s still ongoing. iOS owned the entire touchphone market until Android OS (acquired by Google) came into the market, establishing itself as a direct competitor. Available on both affordable and premium phones, it steadily improved its features from Android 1.5 Cupcake to the latest versions.

Now, Android dominates the smartphone market. In terms of smartphone unit shipments, Android leads significantly.

In the tablet market, Android also holds a leading position. Android has also exceeded Apple in app download numbers and is expected to soon overtake iOS in terms of app developer revenue.

It looks like a comprehensive victory for Android, but Apple’s CEO Tim Cook mentioned that market share didn’t matter if “users dump [Android devices] in the drawer” and use the iPhone for everything instead. Yet Apple did release the iPhone 5c, a “budget” version of the iPhone, indicating they might feel “a little bit” threatened by Android’s rise. Let’s revisit this comparison in the future.

E-Publishing vs P-Publishing

For many years, print publishing was the definition of publishing. But if you have heard of or used an e-book, you are part of the revolution changing the face of publishing. E-publishing allows publishers to cut down on printing and distribution costs, and their books are available for order 24/7.

Social media has become the online version of “word of mouth,” and book recommendation sites like Goodreads have flourished. Despite these benefits, publishers are still ironing out issues related to author royalties, discoverability of new titles, and piracy problems with copyrighted material.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry is undergoing an overhaul, as evidenced by the disrupted businesses of magazines and newspapers. Yet print publishing, or more precisely, books, will always have the support of hardcore fans. Although many print publishers were initially hesitant to join the switch in medium, most have come to embrace it as an additional outlet, rather than a full-on replacement.