Companies Who Destroyed Their Competitors

There are many companies which were at the top once, but couldn’t hold the position for too long and were toppled by much smaller and nimbler companies which had better products and innovations to change the business sector. 24/7 Wall St. has listed out some of those companies who recently toppled from their position.

Google vs. Yahoo

Google is the synonym for internet, searching products, or downloading software. Google rules as the biggest search engine. But it’s hard to believe that this was not the scene earlier. In the early days, Lycos, Excite, AskJeeves were the rulers of the search world. By 20^th century end, Yahoo became the leader by dragging the smaller companies under it at any cost. In 2000, Yahoo had 56 percent of the search engine referrals, which was six times its closest competitor.

Google had only 1 percent of the market in June 2000. Soon Yahoo started using Google’s search algorithm. Yahoo began to lose steam quickly as Google began competing for market share. Within 2002, Google’s efficient search engine became much popular. It referred 31.8 percent of all searches, compared to Yahoo, which is only 36.3 percent. Google’s popularity increased exponentially in the next eight years and reached at the top most position. According to Comscore, in July 2011, Google had more than 65 percent of the market share while Yahoo had just 16.1 percent.

Hewlett-Packard vs. Dell

Dell was once the market King for global PC sales, with 13 percent of the market share. Compaq was second with 11.2 percent share. Over the past decade, the graph of personal computer market has changed drastically. In May 2002, Hewlett-Packard acquired the fraught Compaq for $25 billion.

Dell was the leader with a 17.2 percent of market share till 2005, but HP quickly closed the gap with 14.7 percent share. Within third quarter of 2008 that is within less than three years, HP surpassed Dell, and leads the market till now. In Q2 of 2011, HP’s market share was 17.5 percent, Dell’s was 12.5 percent, and Lenovo’s was 12 percent which is just behind Dell.

Apple vs. Nokia

In Q4 of 2007, Nokia had more than 50 percent of the worldwide smartphone market share, whereas Research In Motion’s Blackberry had 10.9 percent and Apple at just 5.2 percent. Though Apple had less smartphone market share it was leading the digital music device market consistently.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, Apple iPhone still had a relatively small portion of the market with a 16.1 percent share which is a little over half of that of Nokia’s 28 percent. With a huge sale number and Steve Jobs driving the company, Apple shared 19.1 percent market share within second quarter of 2011, with an annual growth of 141 percent. Nokia came down to the third position after Samsung which had a 15.7 percent of the market share.

 

Facebook vs. Myspace

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased upcoming Myspace for $580 million in July 2005, when Facebook membership was still limited to college students. According to Comscore, in May 2007, Facebook’s unique monthly viewers were restricted to just 30 million, whereas Myspace’s were at around 70 million.

In May 2009, Facebook toppled Myspace’s unique viewers, which had still 70 million viewers. Later Facebook had nearly 160 million users. Meanwhile Myspace’s users dropped below 40 million and that number kept on falling. In June 2009, Murdoch sold the dying company Myspace for $35 million which is 93 percent less than the original purchase price.

GM vs. Toyota

General Motors aka GM has actually experienced two major hurdles in the race to become the top automaker in the world. GM had been the dominant leader in U.S., since 1930s, and was dominant in the global market as well, for almost of the latter half of the 20th century. But it started to lose its grip from the top most position, because of the global recession. Toyota officially became the world’s topmost automaker by the end of 2008, beating out GM. GM’s global market share continued to decline globally as well as in U.S.

Due to limited sales and financial troubles from the recession, the manufacturer (GM) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2009. Within two years it regained its top position. GM made profit very quickly as its new IPO was successful. With Japan earthquake hitting its rival Toyota hard, GM again became the world’s largest automaker in August 2009. In the first half of 2011, GM sold 4.5 million units whereas Its Japanese rival, Toyota sold only 3.7 million.

Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble was the largest bookseller for years. However, online retailer Amazon.com has blown the company away by taking book selling online. Amazon.com became less burdened due to no expensive business running stores. The convenience and ease of operations became an additional benefit for Amazon.

Its e-book reader Kindle surpassed the e-reader race with B&N’s Nook and others. Barnes & Noble’s net income dropped from $147 million in 2006 to a loss of $74 million in 2010. Amazon, meanwhile saw a net profit from $190 million to $1.2 billion.

Blockbuster vs. Netflix

Blockbuster is a VHS rental company founded in 1985. Blockbuster, with more than 6,500 stores around the country, went public in 1999, the same year when Netflix launched. By 2006, Netflix came into the picture by making just $1 billion profit that year, which was not so close to the figure of Blockbuster’s revenue, which was roughly $5.5 billion.

But the small company introduced streaming video in 2007, which allowed the viewers to watch films on home computers. This unique feature, along with the growing popularity of the company’s DVD delivery service became an additional benefit to Netflix and it led to a steady downfall of Blockbuster’s profitability. By 2010, the massive company Blockbusters lost it millions of customers each quarter. Finally it declared bankruptcy by the middle of the year. By then, Netflix had more than 25 million subscribers.

 

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Indians Worry About...

Corruption and financial or political scandals are the biggest worries for 71 percent Indians, revealed a global poll by Ipsos. The Ipsos poll was conducted among 18,687 global citizens in 24 Countries to assess the most worrying issues, direction and satisfaction in their country.

Terrorism is the second biggest worry (38 percent), followed by Crime and Violence (34 percent), Poverty and Social Inequality (31 percent), Unemployment and jobs (28 percent), high tax rate (15 percent) and healthcare and education both (14 percent).

Biswarup Banerjee, Head Marketing Communications, Ipsos India said “India has been rocked lately by a series of corruption scandals that have embarrassed the government, rattled markets and delayed reform bills as the opposition stalled parliament and government was busy tackling agitation for strong anti-corruption Citizens Ombudsmen ‘Jan Lokpal’ bill lead by Anna Hazare.”

Banerjee added that “The country, 87th in Transparency International's rankings based on perceived levels of corruption, is no stranger to scandals, thus it is not a surprise to see Indians are most worried about corruption and financial or political scandals.”

The poll revealed that only 45 percent Indians believe that things in India are heading in the right direction currently, which is a big drop of 27 points from a year back when the Indian economy was registering healthy growth in spite of global slowdown. Even satisfaction level with how things are going in the country has declined to 44 percent from 71 percent a year back, a significant drop of 27 points.

“Multiple high profile corruption cases in the recent past and regular harassment faced by ordinary citizen to get a simple job done from various government departments has dented confidence of Indians in the system and given rise to deep sense of dissatisfaction,” said  Banerjee.  

Unemployment and jobs is the biggest area of concern for 49 percent global citizen, followed by Poverty and Social Inequality (39 percent), Corruption and Financial or Political Scandals (34 percent) and Crime and Violence (30 percent). Health care followed next at 23 percent, taxes at 20 percent and education at 19 percent.

The poll found that 77 percent citizens of Saudi Arabia think that things in their country are heading in the right direction, leading by a wide margin. Following behind are China (57 percent), Canada and Indonesia both (53 percent), Brazil (52 percent), Argentina and Turkey both (47 percent) and India (45 percent).

On the satisfaction category, almost seven in ten (67 percent) citizens of Saudi Arabia say they are satisfied with the way things are going in their country followed by Canada (59 percent), Sweden (56 percent), China and Germany both (49 percent), Australia (48 percent) and India at 44 percent.

The survey was conducted in 24 countries including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America.

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Ways Technology Could Jail You

Technology has aimed to make life easier, but there are ways in which it could actually ruin life and peace of mind. Even if you forget that potential recruiters could hire or fire you based on your Facebook profile, and that people judge you by your profile picture-- your deleted photos are still available, and you are privy to information like who un-friended you, internet firms can read your personal texts, SOPA and PIPA’s cousin-bills are still in the writing, and governments could access your mail or comments and prosecute you for them.

Now although most of these deal with the issue of privacy, recent events have shown that anything you do in the digital world can be used against you, (especially when more connectivity means more accessible you are) and you could even end up facing a sentence in jail, or even worse, reported PC Mag.

Read on to know about eight incidents that show how technology could ruin your life:

1. The right to “tweetdom”
Hamza Kashgari, a Saudi journalist and poet is facing trial and could be sentenced to death for expressing his views on Twitter. The 23 year old dared to envision a conversation between him and the Prophet Mohammed. He tweeted about his experience on the day of Mawlid, (i.e. Prophet Mohammed’s birthday) saying “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.” His tweets also went on to say “On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.” The three tweets showed him as a controversial figure, even after he had deleted his account and issued a letter of apology for the same. As a result, he tried to seek political asylum in New Zealand, but was deported from Malaysia back to Saudi Arabia.

2. What’s in a name?
In the United States, domain name seizures of websites by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security are fairly common. Although most would expect their seizures to be against file-sharing or copyright-infringement sites, their seizures don’t need a conviction to go forward, and according to a report on PC Mag, there’s no transparency as far as who condemned the site. Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org (Spanish sites that had been seized late last year) were seized apparently because they contained links to live sport video streams. Another site that made news in this case includes hip-hop blog DaJaz1.com which was seized because it allowed to listen to music, and featured what it says is copyrighted material. Ultimately, the domain name of the site was restored.

3. Jail-breaking could be made illegal
Not referring to breaking out of prison, this action allows you to hack into your own device so you’re allowed to customize it according to your taste. PC Mag’s article said that sometimes what happens to an object interests the device’s manufacturers, and so this action could be made illegal.

 

4. Terms of agreement or terms of abuse?
Every time you sign up for a service online, you tend to click the “I Agree” on the document that has most of the terms and conditions stated. However, Richard Downing, the American Justice Department's deputy chief of computer crime has suggested to the government to expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act so violations of the terms of use violations of terms of use subjects offenders to the Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. This means those who hack into critical national infrastructure would have increased penalties, but those who create a fake Facebook account, are not honest on a dating site, or upload a prohibited video to YouTube will also have the same type of punishment.

5. Sharing isn’t caring
A natural resources coordinator by occupation,  Jammie Thomas-Rasset shared about 24 songs on a file sharing site and has been battling with the court over the same for the past four years. 2010 saw her third trial. After one jury found her liable for copyright infringement in 2007, she was ordered to pay $222,000 as a fine to the music label companies. The judge later ruled that he erred in instructing the jury and called for a retrial. The second trial (which took place in 2009) she was found liable for $1.92 million. The next case saw the jury deciding that the price of file-sharing had gone back up and the mother of four was asked to pay $1.5 million, but the court itself reduced it to $54,000. Thomas-Rasset has appealed the decision.

6. The right to inform?
Shi Tao, a journalist from China, is serving a ten-year sentence after which he will be denied political rights for two year, because he sent an email to the Asia Democracy Foundation in the United States.His email, which contained a document from the Communist party that ordered the suppression of media coverage on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, of dissidents returning to China. Yahoo supplied the Chinese government with Shi’s email, saying it was following the nation’s law, following which the government deemed the email as evidence of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.” Shi is still imprisoned.

7. Being Responsible Adults
SOPA and PIPA received a lot of attention last year, with even Wikipedia blacking out against it, but the bills’ cousin, called “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” didn’t. This is because the bill does a lot to protect children, but at the same time, PC Mag’s report stated that if the bill is passed, ISPs will be required to retain every IP address they assign, and all activity (i.e. social networking, instant messaging, email, Web browsing, and downloads) associated with them (this also includes internet services used on mobile phones, phone numbers and tracking IDs, and banking information). They will also be able to obtain a subpoena for anyone within 500 miles of an investigative sex offender or anyone who’s had any online contact with one (even if they only got a spam email from the targets).   

8. Overprotecting against the right to privacy
American teens in the state of Arizona will soon need to text in codes and because a senator in the state has proposed a wireless carrier mechanism by which parents will be able to read the texts their children send, and not just see the recipient and the time of sending. This bill would require parents to pay a fee for the service, and will need the child to permit the service to be carried out.

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Careers That Are Fading Today

 

The best way of selecting your career is to know the job market well. The advancement in technology, changing perspectives of hiring strategy, and the uncertainty in global economy are the key players in job market. In one of its recent report by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) says while industries like healthcare and professional and business services are expected to bring up more number of job openings by 2020, there are industries which are going to decline many of its today’s job availability. Like agriculture is blurred from offering jobs, some of the jobs related to manufacturing, public sector and media also to cut off many jobs which are available today.

Here are five careers that are projected to fade away in near future. If you are looking to start your career with anyone of these jobs, be aware of the challenges it may bring as they are expected to vanish soon, from job market.

Journalists:

The way of reporting witnessed a dramatic change in the past decade with the advent of Information Superhighway, the journalists whom you met with notebooks and tape recorders are fading from the journalism. Information technology could make a great impact on news gathering. In today’s journalism, content is the king where the more priority was given to timeliness in early days. Where in today, everything is reported on time and the prominence of journalists diminishes as media has become more and more fragmented. The rise of citizen journalism where everyone shares what is happening around them, impacted formal and traditional journalistic approach in news gathering.

Financial Products Salespeople:

A daunting shrinkage is to happen in the jobs of financial products salespersons, as the scenario shows the door-to-door insurance salespersons will not be any more in the finance sectors. Access to computers and internet changed the world in such a level where we can purchase any products online. Even for financial aids, today’s generation largely depend on online information where we can interact with the virtual salespersons who can guide with latest insurance trends. Still most of the consumers make use of the invest analysis annual reports and catalogs which are available online. Face-to-face sales of financial product seem to be vanished by 2020.

Postmasters and Mail Superintendents:

E-mails have overtaken the importance of sending letters and greetings through post office. It has also decreased the role of postmasters and mail superintendents who are supposed to organize and supervise processing of incoming and outgoing mail. The possibility of instant communication could bring a remarkable progression in all sectors. The days are gone where people waited for more than three days to get mails. Today, within seconds or minutes everything gets on our finger tips a mouse click away. But unfortunately, a number of job openings are declined in the sector.

Agricultural Workers:

In India, it was agriculture which supports the economy. Even though, India holds second place in agriculture production among all nations, the sector seems to be diminished.  In fact, most of the youngsters are not interested in farming and agricultural field works. And most of the landscapes and rural areas are seemingly urbanized. And the lack of agricultural labors and more opportunities in other sectors turn the farmers to stop farming. Today, agriculture has a declining role in the economy. Low labor mobility and slow growth in productivity cause the decline of agriculture in economy and in labor force.

File Clerks:

Earlier in every office, file clerks played a key role where all the documents were paper filed. It was a man labor job to collect, organize and manage all documents according to the priority. Along with various other clerical duties, a file clerk asked to supervise all records of that particular organization. S/he is supposed to manage all databases, records, and any documented information from various departments and employees. As today, everything is documented and filed online; the need of file clerk is decreased.

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