None of them are at the Consumer Electronics Show 2013. Some might make an argument for either Microsoft or Samsung as a potential fifth, but those are highly contestable assertions.
Mostly everybody agrees that the four horsemen of the Internet are Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
You can make your own assessments of what that might mean in the future for a meeting that historically has touted "consumer electronics." Over the years have featured TVs and video entertainment technology, then computers, then mobile phones and now might be adding tablets.
But lots of the attention this year, to the extent there is a clear theme, seems to be reverting back to TVs and applications that run on TVs. And that might tell you something. Many of us cannot think of a better venue for TVs.
But lots of us would argue that in a world where so much of the value of anything people do with Internet-connected appliances rests with software, CES is losing a good deal of relevance. That none of the "four horsemen" feel they "must" be there tells you something.
It used to be the case that only Apple was the major player without a presence. These days, the absences are more telling.
Back closer to the turn of the century, any discussion of the "four horsemen of the Internet" would have featured names such as Cisco, EMC, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
Perhaps nine years later, all the names have changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment