Technology Titans Refresh: Feb 2012

In the past, Bob had been vigorously keeping up with the Titans of the Tech industry. His posts are here and here. These posts should give a picture of how the technology world is moving (and over time, identify trends). We have used market capitalization as our key indicator, but that’s just for ranking purposes. We intend to continue our Tech Titans list in 2012, and the first post will be an update of his old tech titans list. That said, we will begin to break them into sections and examine how the market affects them, and they affect the market.

Apple has clearly blown by all other tech firms (and almost all corporations worldwide). But at least this analyst believes that the Apple bubble will burst, and may burst sooner than later. Their commitment to patent trolling and ‘the destruction of Android’ do not bode well for the future. That said, due to the impact of consumer technology on enterprise, as well their huge footprint, they and Google (via their Android Mobile OS) are a large part of technology steering. The other Titan that we cannot forget is Microsoft. They have already sold over 550M Win7 licenses (which out performs any estimates for both Android and iOS – around 500M total devices in the past few years).

In the enterprise, IBM has moved from selling millions of PCs a year to providing some high-end server and primarily services. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, but that hasn’t changed their position. HP and Dell have been hit hard, Lenovo is taking over much of their US business (especially in large and small business). HP has been devastated by a myriad of issues, which include the WebOS bungling and a commitment to “stopping PC manufacturing.” The rest of the Tech Titans are soldiering on – fighting for constrained IT dollars and integrating cloud and mobile capabilities.