In six years, Apple will no longer be king of all technology companies, as per a venture capitalist with vast experience in investing in technology startups that have proven to be forces to be reckoned with.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson believes Apple will cease to be the most important technology firm in the world in 2020. Its descent will be so fast it will not even be in the top three, says Wilson, who was interviewed by TechCrunch chief executive Michael Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.
His reason? "Apple is too rooted in hardware and I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity. Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don't think they think about data and the cloud in the way you need to think about things," explains [video] Wilson.
Google, Facebook and a company "we've never heard of" will be clinching the top three places instead, he says.
Wilson is co-founder and managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm with a reputation for investing early in small companies that have grown to be successful giants in the technology industry, such as Twitter, Kickstarter and Foursquare.
He believes Twitter will shoot up to the top 10 biggest technology firms of 2020, predicting it will place "maybe four, five, six, seven - but I'm not sure they'll be one or two."
These predictions, however, run counter to Apple's strong stock, which has been climbing up by 31% for the last 12 months. In its second-quarter earnings call, Apple also reported a massive jump in its already soaring sales of iPhones and iPads, thanks to a 55% sales growth in India, where the iPhone has been lagging behind Samsung's Android-based smartphones.
Wilson has long been critical of Apple. In a blog post he wrote in 2013, Wilson was apparently unhappy that Apple's supposedly inexpensive iPhone 5C retailed at around $700 in out-of-US markets.
"The reality of much of the world is that people don't sign two-year contracts like we do here in the US. They buy pre-paid sim cards and stick them into unsubsidized phones. And on that basis, the 5C is a big disappointment," writes Wilson.
In January last year, research firm IDC reported that Google's Android quickly overtook majority of the smartphone platform market, claiming nearly 80% of the entire market share. Its growth rate has slowed since then, but Android can only grow so much in a market it has already saturated. Apple's iOS, on the other hand, dipped from 19% of the market share in 2012 to 15% in 2013.
If Wilson's predictions are true, Apple will not be the first technology giant to drop out of the race. Just look at what happened to AOL, which is currently what's happening to Yahoo. For the first time in nine years, Yahoo will not make it to Fortune's list of 500 largest companies in the US after the company's revenue dropped to a paltry $4.68 billion.
