The Technological Divide
It is happening again in the Silicon Valley. A recent announcement by Larry Page to restructure Google and form a new holding company, Alphabet, has led to discussions and speculations on various sites on the internet. A multitude of opinions are being expressed with regards to the justification of such a move.
The Cloud Computing Services market today is dominated by the ‘Big Four’, the four Corporate Giants – Amazon with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft with Azure Platform, Google with Google Cloud and IBM with IBM Cloud. As per market analysts, the four players are likely to consolidate the market further which would mean a lot of smaller players going out of business. However, let us wait a minute. Are the analysts right? Don’t we have one more player knocking at the doors, can get into the block, and even overcome the leader?
A recent study of Synergy Research indicates a trend towards a possible oligopoly in the Cloud Services Providers’ Market. Data from Synergy Research reveals that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google in cloud infrastructure space account for more than half of the global market. The total market share of the ‘big four’ is about 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, the consolidation seems to be increasing year on year.
Imagine if you can take your “car” to downtown for having lunch and leave the vehicle to park all by itself. Imagine a blind or a disabled, an elderly or a drunk, riding the vehicle all alone without fearing an accident, or being nabbed by the police. This is the Self Driving Car or the “Smart Car” for you.
If reports are to be believed, Apple Music has touched a download figure of about 10 million users only 4 weeks after its launch. That itself is amazing if we compare with Spotify which took more than five and half years to reach to first 10 million paying customers.
“We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem including our first-party device family,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said in an email to employees. “In the near-term, we’ll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility.”
Social media, which were in their infancy at the beginning of the twenty-first century have evolved rapidly and today, they have become part of our daily existence. They have affected how we work and how we communicate. The power of Social Media lie in the way they allow us to build associations, relevant groups for discussions, share and collect news, stories, and other bits of information. Social media have also helped long lost friends to find one another and enabled users to form virtual communities.