Ars Technica's 2019 'Deathwatch' List Includes Essential and 'Facebook Management' (arstechnica.com) 50
The editors of Ars Technica have announced their annual "Deathwatch" list, identifying "companies, tech, and trends least likely to succeed in 2019." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The past year has been an absolute freefall for Essential.... The market was ultimately not impressed with the Essential phone, and the fire sales started almost immediately. Only two months after launch, the phone got a permanent $200 price drop, to $499. November saw deals as low as $399. Eventually, the $700 phone was discounted all the way down to $224, thanks to a mix of poor sales and a lack of consumer confidence in the company. A poorly selling phone was one thing, but things really started to look bad for Essential in May, when it was announced the company had cancelled the second generation Essential Phone. The first device took such a toll on the company that it was considering selling itself, and suddenly the future of Essential was in doubt.
While the phone was dead, in May the company said it was focusing on an upcoming smart home product and operating system. But by October, it announced that it was cutting 30 percent of its staff, and the company was pivoting away from smart home products and would try building a phone again. It will re-sell you a missing headphone jack, though. Essential's next phone -- if the company lasts that long -- is supposedly "an AI Phone That Texts People for You" according to Bloomberg. That sounds awful. On top of all that, Essential's CEO and founder Rubin has been the subject of a major sexual misconduct controversy at Google.
They also write that 2019 "is going to probably determine whether Facebook's management team will continue as it is -- or whether there's a stockholder rebellion, or a government lawsuit, or some combination of both that drives CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others out."
Also on their "Deathwatch" list are Snap, and Verizon's "AOL/Yahoo Frankenstein" -- but not Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. "As much as we'd love to plop Goop on the 2019 Deathwatch, it is still just on our Deathwatch wish list. Goop is, in fact, thriving."
While the phone was dead, in May the company said it was focusing on an upcoming smart home product and operating system. But by October, it announced that it was cutting 30 percent of its staff, and the company was pivoting away from smart home products and would try building a phone again. It will re-sell you a missing headphone jack, though. Essential's next phone -- if the company lasts that long -- is supposedly "an AI Phone That Texts People for You" according to Bloomberg. That sounds awful. On top of all that, Essential's CEO and founder Rubin has been the subject of a major sexual misconduct controversy at Google.
They also write that 2019 "is going to probably determine whether Facebook's management team will continue as it is -- or whether there's a stockholder rebellion, or a government lawsuit, or some combination of both that drives CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others out."
Also on their "Deathwatch" list are Snap, and Verizon's "AOL/Yahoo Frankenstein" -- but not Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. "As much as we'd love to plop Goop on the 2019 Deathwatch, it is still just on our Deathwatch wish list. Goop is, in fact, thriving."
A headphone jack ain't gonna cut it (Score:4, Funny)
No linky? (Score:2)
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First link.
Not to be confused with first post.
However I think you [chrism238] can probably claim to be first to not read the article before commenting.
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I was obviously going for snide. Three levels of snide, actually.
Snark hunting on today's Slashdot? Seems so pointless.
I certainly hope you don't work in a technical field, because your reasoning capabilities are obviously deficient. Most obviously, I did NOT limit my comment to your "good slashdotters" and made no assumptions about the OP. At this point I think most of the "good slashdotters" of yore are RIP. (That is usually a cue for some 3-digit ID to pipe up, eh? "I'm still alive!")
Seems to be another
More suggestions (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Tim Cook as Apple CEO
2) Windows 10, or at least its update cycle
3) Elon Musk as Tesla CEO
4) MoviePass
5) Smartphones without notches
6) APK spam on Slashdot
Wish list:
1) Ajit Pai as FCC chairman
2) Systemd
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I'm pretty sure MoviePass already died.
musk and whole of tesla depends on next years numb (Score:2)
musk and whole of tesla depends on next years numbers... anyways, the problem for him was that for 10 years he managed to keep the money rolling in with the tweets.
that is literally what he thinks that kept the investment money rolling in. you can even trace old popular mechanics ideas touted as new ideas on his tweets to tesla needing cash.
so he thinks thats whats normal, and that it isn't a piss poor idea to have an official company outlet for (stock)news be his twitter account. for various reasons, one o
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Great list; mod up!
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2) Windows 10, or at least its update cycle
Microsoft is doubling down on their update cycle, and getting as close to continuous integration as they can. In practice the closest they can get is probably weekly releases.
So get ready for weekly releases of Windows! Hey, no complaining, all the cool kids are doing it!
Postmortems of the overlooked? (Score:3)
It was an interesting and enjoyable story, but the thing that seemed to be missing was missed picks, as in "Who died without getting listed?", "Which major companies went bust without making the list?", or even "What was the largest collapse that should have been picked?" Focusing on the near-death cases seems relatively easy (at least in terms of the mostly obvious candidates they discussed), but I feel like there might be more to learn from a few postmortems of overlooked failures.
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If you want that answer, look at the retail B&M market. That's where the businesses that died nobody even heard about happened.
Re:Postmortems of the overlooked? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the biggest tech failure of 2018 was Theranos.
Here is a list [businessinsider.com] of 25 other tech flameouts. I never heard of most of them.
Outside of tech, I think the biggest failure was Sears.
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Thanks, highly informative response, though I still wonder how they missed the Ars Technica list. Theranos in particular seems like it should have been noticed. As it notes, the rest of them were relatively tiny companies, so maybe that's sufficient explanation.
Sears is probably outside of the scope of Ars Technica. Also it's been a long and pretty visible decline.
Goop isn't going anywhere (Score:1)
Lifestyle Brand ? (Score:3)
What people can't even figure out how they want to live for themselves anymore ?
We may be done for as a species.
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Humans are social creatures. It's nothing new.
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Essential phone, android with a couple of gimmicks (Score:2)
I'v never heard of it before so I googled.
It's a reasonable spec android phone. The one vaguely attractive aspect is a claim of rapid release of updates, sadly not a promise of just security updates for significantly risky vulnerabilities, just fast updates which might mean rapidly implementing things like google not allowing call recording any more.
It has magnetically attached accessories. I don't want the magnetic strips on my train tickets and payment cards erased when I shove them in my pocket with my p
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I stopped reading at headphone jack! Nuke them (Essentials) from orbit! Burn them at the stake! Kill their offspring so they can't spawn more! Die die die!
The headphone jacks u back bitches!
How accurate were their past lists? (Score:5, Informative)
So how good is their track record?
Final tally:
.500. Not exactly stellar.
7 correct
3 premature by one year, one obvious (Radio Shack, Yahoo, Theranos)
9 wrong
4 unknown (Gearbox, Uber, Faraday Future, SoundCloud)
So they're batting around
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If you continue with your baseball reference, you're right a .500 average is not exactly stellar, its amazing.
Batting .500? (Score:4, Interesting)
I got a kick out of how you used that baseball analogy for this. Batting .500 would in fact be almost god like in modern baseball. Even .400 isn't really considered attainable anymore.
This doesn't invalidate what you're actually getting at of course, it just means your analogy is terrible.
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HTC was about to close down before Google bought them so you can count them in the dead pile
They forgot one (Score:2)