| Hi, Jeff here. The failings of the tech industry haven't always been top of mind the last two years, but of late they've become tougher to ignore. The reason? After years of wild success, a bunch of the world's biggest companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, and Meta, have lost between a quarter and half their market value in 2022. For Bloomberg Businessweek's annual Tech Issue, we set out to answer two questions: How did the industry get here, and where is it headed? The stories assess the damage to date and game out some of the next steps. We see the costs of Elon Musk's latest antics, Chrome's supremacy, the added strain on Uber and Lyft drivers, and Instagram struggling to turn itself into TikTok. The centerpiece of the package, an essay by Brad Stone and Lizette Chapman, makes clear that the tech rout wasn't some act of God—that the industry earned it by leaping at short-term profits instead of stable wealth creation. One symptom was all the scooters that were lying around for a couple of years, whose companies can't quite field the fleets they used to. Our field guide to Silicon Valley's next version update has some new names you should learn, too—from Kalshi, a CFTC-approved website that lets you bet on almost anything, to Genomic Prediction, which promises to compare the health of embryos available for IVF implantation. Big Tech isn't going anywhere, either, but as Brad and Lizette write, we've got a once-in-a-generation moment to reassess which parts of the industry are working, and which aren't. —Jeff Muskus  Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, April 4, 2022. Illustration: Michael DeForge | 
No comments:
Post a Comment