“From the EMC boardroom you can see the carnage of the mini computer industry – Wang, DEC, Data General – you can see their buildings from the headquarters,” said VMWare’s CEO Pat Gelsinger during an interview this morning.
Gelsinger’s point is well made, those companies were victims of the last major computing shift which saw the minicomputer fall out of favour and be replaced with workgroup servers largely running Windows.
For VMWare, those Windows based servers were the basis of their successful virtualization product and the company was one of the winners of the shift to Personal Computers.
Shifting to the cloud
Now a shift to the cloud, something that Gelsinger sees as a bigger and more fundamental change than the one that dispatched companies like Wang, DEC and Data General to the deadpool in the 1990s, threatens to do the same to the companies that did well in the PC era.
That shift is seeing VMWare repositioning their business to their “unified hybrid cloud”, Dell shifting away from being primarily a PC manufacturer and Microsoft rethinking its entire existence. All of these companies are deeply threatened by IT’s move to the cloud and mobile services.
Watching for unicorpses
It isn’t just today’s incumbents that are threatened by shifting markets, a few of the current crop of today’s billion dollar unicorns will almost certainly become ‘unicorpses’ warns Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair.
That some of today’s seemingly untouchable tech startups may also join venerable older companies in the history books may surprise some but the risks are high, the shifts are great and the successful business strategies are not always obvious early in a technology shift.
One clear point is that size is no barrier to eventual failure, as we see with once untouchable giants winding up after technology and markets move against them it’s only the fast moving and flexible thinking that will survive.