Editor’s letter

It’s not often that I render people speechless, but for a few seconds there was a distinct pause on the other end of the line. thought for a moment that our Zoom connection had frozen, but no; the thought I put forward seemed too staggering to imagine.

Some context. This was a conversation about the history of technology, because it turns out that I’m now a dinosaur. The “4” at the beginning of my age, which I’d just become used to, will next year tick over to a “5”, and that means I grew up in the mysterious era of co mputers unconnected to the internet.

To the young student interviewing me, this was a world beyond her ken. She was a true “digital native”, and our call was part of her research into what tech journalism was like in the prehistoric era known as the late 1990s. A time when Google was just starting to hit the mainstream, and our sub-editors still turned to physical encyclopedias to check facts.

It was my take on Google that had taken her aback. “You really think it might not exist in 20 years’ time?” I confirmed this was true, and that I hadn’t been drinking the good whisky. I wouldn’t bet my house on Google becoming a footnote in IT history, I explained, but it hadn’t cemented its position in the same way as, say, Amazon.

My argument was simple enough. First, the history of computing is littered with once-glorious names that are now sepia-tinged relics: Alta Vista, Compaq, CompuServe,

Gateway 2000, Netscape and Silicon Graphics spring to mind. Just because a company is riding high today doesn’t mean it will be dominant in a decade. Indeed, the bigger they are, the harder they sometimes fall, such is the vicious world of global corporate competition.

Google specifically feels vulnerable because it hasn’t put down physical roots. It sprang to prominence because it solved the problem of web search so much better than what was previously on offer. And it absolutely devastated the thenlandscape of web directories and search engines, much like locusts attack fields of wheat. Why should we imagine that Google itself isn’t vulnerable to such an attack, especially when so much of its business remains founded on search?

Compare Google’s world to that of Amazon. It has gone from being an online bookstore to one of the biggest logistics companies in the world. In doing so, it has moved from the digital domain to the physical in a way that Google can’t match. Of course, that comes with overheads and complications, ones that may ultimately prove Amazon’s downfall, but compare the barrier of entry into Amazon’s domain to that of Google’s: it would take a decade of successful moves for a new company (or an existing one) to become a threat. Whereas, just like PageRank did to Alta Vista, Google could rapidly be tumbled by a killer idea.

I’m not suggesting that I believe Google will be a piece of history in 20 years. Or Amazon, Apple, Bitcoin, Facebook or Microsoft. But I’m willing to give you even odds that one of them won’t be around in 2041. And no, I don’t accept cryptocurrency.