Tag: Internet Big Five

Predictions 2012 #5: A Big Year for M&A

(image) One of the things that pops out of the “Big Five” chart I just posted, at least if you stare at it a bit, are the places where each company needs to get strong, quickly. Apple is weak in social and one dimensional in ad solutions. Microsoft needs to improve its device products, build out its entertainment distribution muscle, and keep improving search share. Google wants to get better in productivity software, social, and payments. Amazon needs help in devices, social, and OS. Facebook has work to do in many areas, including devices, search, payment, and voice.

When the five largest companies in our space have a lot of needs, they tend to pull out the wallet and go shopping. Sometimes they buy their way into partnerships, but often, they simply buy.

Hence my  fifth prediction for 2012: Expect Internet M&A to heat up, big time. It’s not just going to be the Big Five who drive this trend, it’ll be a whole mess of players looking to consolidate power and press into the double-digit growth market that is the Internet (and by Internet, I also mean mobile and enterprise, of course). Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson knows how to buy companies and has a data focus, for example. That could mean competition to purchase marketing, ad tech, and data companies like Blue Kai, Quantcast, or MarketShare. MediaBank is on a tear and will be on the lookout for similar kinds of companies. IBM has a deep interest in the marketing tech world, expect Big Blue to make some big moves as well. And Twitter will certainly be flexing its muscles, now that it’s bulked up with nearly a billion in fresh capital.

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The Internet Big Five By Product Strength

As I have written in previous predictions, I’ve been focusing on the Internet Big Five lately, and expect that to continue this year, as the group, collectively, are something of a “character” in my upcoming book (as is Twitter, the “free radical”). Other characters include “The Government” and “Corporations,” so expect predictions about those players in the next few days. But today, I want to focus on the Big Five as a whole. I’ve been staring at these companies, trying to understand their strategic imperatives, which is why I found myself making yet another chart.

This one focuses on core product lines where all (or most) of these companies are playing. For me, these product lines, taken together, are the basis of what we might call “the operating system of our lives.” And since the book is about how we will be leveraging our lives over digital platforms in one generation, it struck me as important to assess where each of the Big Five is right now (what they have already built) and where they are weak (what they need to build to compete).

Here’s the chart:

As you can see, I’ve laid out the same five companies, listed top to bottom by market cap. From left to right are columns of various product lines or offerings that I’ve determined are crucial areas that any player in the “OS of our life” must address. I’ve keyed each company against each product line with one of four scores, from “Strong” – where a company already dominates – to “Weak” – where a company either does not play, or has an anemic offering. The terms “Developing” and “Improving” demonstrate that the company is making progress in that area, from either a weak position (“Developing”) or a middling position (“Improving”).

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Predictions 2012 #3: The Facebook Ad Network

For my third prediction of the year, I’m going with one just a tad bit less obvious than “Facebook will go public.” There seems to be no doubt about that event occurring this year, though I’ve certainly heard intelligent folks argue that Facebook can and should figure out how to stay private. I’ve argued that Facebook ought to be a public company, if only to be held (somewhat) accountable given all the data it has on our lives.

But this prediction has to do with Facebook announcing and then launching a web-wide advertising network along the lines of Google’s AdSense. I’ve talked about this for years (short handing it as “FaceSense,”) and I’ve asked Mark Zuckerberg, Carolyn Everson, Bret Taylor, and Sheryl Sandberg about it on stage and off. The answer is always the same: We’re not interested in launching a web ad network at this time.

I predict that line will change in 2012. Here’s why:

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Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago

My predictions this year will be pretty focused on the Internet Big Five (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) but the first two focus on Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is poised to become a critical “free radical” whose presence affects the actions of all the Big Five players. And 2012 will be the year this becomes readily apparent. In short: In 2012, every Big Five Internet company will need to have a clear Twitter strategy. At the moment, not all of them do.

What do I mean when I use the term “free radical”? Well, taken loosely from molecular chemistry and biology, free radicals are particles with open shells or unpaired electrons – they cause change in otherwise stable systems. I take the term with a bit more license, however – to me Twitter is the only Internet service at scale that has yet to ossify into a predictable platform with a massive revenue base to protect. This fact, plus the company’s liberal philosophical bent toward free speech, positions Twitter as something of a shape-shifting arms merchant in the ongoing battle between the Internet Big Five. Believe me, any one of the Five would kill to own Twitter, several of them have tried to buy the company over the past few years. It’s now clear that Twitter’s path is one of independence. To succeed, it must become the Swiss bank of social intent, providing its services in some kind of useful way to each and every one of the Big Five.

2011 has already set the table for how this year is going to play out. In short, Microsoft and Apple embraced Twitter, Google and Facebook rejected it, and Amazon stayed on the sidelines, for the most part.

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Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

2012 is going to be a year of contrasts – of consolidation of power for the Internet Big Five, and fragmentation and disruption of that power due to both startups as well as government and consumer action. I’ve spent the past few weeks jotting down thoughts for 2012, and hope to do the Year That Is About To Be justice in the following set of posts.

Yes, I said “set of posts,” because for the first time since the birth of this blog (that’d be nine years ago), I’m going to post my predictions one by one. Why? Well, because I’d like to dig in a bit on each. If I do it all in one post, we’d have a *very* long read, and most of you are just too busy for that. I don’t plan to release these posts slowly, I’m just going to write till I’m done, so ideally I’ll be done in a few days. And when I’ve finished, I’ll post a summary of them all, for those of you who want all these predictions in one easily linkable place.

So let’s start with Prediction #1: Twitter will become a media company, and the only “free radical of scale” in our Internet ecosystem. 

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