Big OIl Faded. Will Big Tech?

[RV_]

Excerpt:

"Less than a decade ago, Exxon Mobil was the most valuable company in the world. On Monday, it’s being kicked out of the Dow Jones industrial average after nearly a century of inclusion in the stock index.

I’m mentioning an energy company in a technology newsletter for two reasons: First, as wild as it feels to have a handful of American technology superpowers rule the economy and the stock market and influence world events, oil superpowers like Exxon were in a similar position not very long ago.

And second, while it’s hard to imagine Big Tech losing relevance, most people didn’t predict that demand for fossil fuels would start to wane, until it did. That’s part of the sweeping changes that ushered out the era of Big Oil and started the Big Tech age. Today all of Exxon is worth less than Jeff Bezos.

Exxon’s star faded because the world changed, and it didn’t. The question is whether what happened to Exxon is a warning about the potential vulnerability of today’s tech superpowers — or if it’s the opposite: a sign of how Big Tech is invincible in ways that Exxon wasn’t.

The 2012 book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” described how the company at its peak helped steer U.S. foreign policy, supported sometimes authoritarian leaders in oil-rich countries and shaped people’s views on important issues like climate change to suit its interests. Its author, Steve Coll, called Exxon the world’s most powerful unelected force, and I’ve wondered for years whether big tech companies are the new Exxon.

Apple wouldn’t be the company it is today without its savvy diplomatic skills in the United States and China to advance its own business interests. Facebook is so influential that it’s a tool used both against and by authoritarian governments. Google shapes how government regulators and the public think about antitrust laws. It’s an imperfect comparison, but big tech companies are private empires in some of the same ways as the old Exxon.

But not long after Coll’s book was published, Exxon’s influence and riches started to decline. The status of the world’s most valuable company shifted to Apple. Exxon and other oil giants mostly missed out on the fracking boom, and on the move away from fossil fuels. Exxon still has influence like it did in the old days, but it’s not the same.

“Time has marched on and these big companies have not been nimble enough,” Clifford Krauss, a New York Times energy correspondent, told me when I asked about the comparison between Big Oil and Big Tech.

One fundamental difference is that Big Oil’s fate relies on demand for a product that the companies can’t control. The tech industry doesn’t seem to have this essential vulnerability."

Much more and hot links in the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology/big-oil-faded-will-big-tech.html?ocid=uxbndlbing

 

 

 

[Randyretired]

Years ago I worked for Ma Bell (AT&T)  Some might call that a tech company.  Divestiture left it a shadow of its former self.  There have been rumblings of splitting some tech companies.  Time marches on.

[RandyA]

I once made pretty good money fixing VCR's and performing head alignments on both 8" and 5-1/4" floppy disc drives in both Wang and TRS-80 computers.  The last time someone asked me about a VCR was when they said, "What is that?"

[Kirk W]

I never expected to see a day when I wanted to see higher prices for gasoline & diesel! Yet here I am, living in TX where oil plays such a role in the economy that I seem to look at those prices differently. 

[Sehc]

Fossil fuels are slowly going away. Do any see digital technology getting anything but bigger?

[RV_]

Kirk,

The bottom are examples and are all about the money the biggies have. Lobbying and paying off the representatives to stop competition is business not politics regardless of crossover effects. Let's keep this limited to industries like oil and gas that are soon to be gone the way of the buggy whips and the steam powered manufacturing plants. Once your state government decides to not bankrupt your state by being the last holdout for fossil fuels and ICE age vehicles, they could make the moves now creating millions of renewable energy jobs from wind, solar, backup utility size battery systems, home insulation and incentives for earth sheltered homes. There is much more. The world is in a paradigm shift going hard and strong and the deniers in every area, tech or not, will lose. Look at Kodak and resisting digital cameras. Look at the phone companies who had a monopoly on Internet access for at least 20 years then decided that fiber installation was too costly. Now they are trying to switch folks to mobile phone broadband? and let cable take over who are now losing to smaller local and municipal ISPs. Here in Colorado we have towns of 2000 with gigabit fiber Internet access as just one example. https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/

Look for the big Internet companies going down in the next ten years. An example. Before we moved I tried to avoid the cities and get a nice rural place. But because we are both about to in two years be in our 70s the hassle of traveling for medical care at least an hour, and shopping limitations SWMBO decided here was good. My part was making sure we had broadband. I found Meeker Colorado out in the kind of country I wanted to try but she convinced me. I hat it when she's right!

But when I asked by calling they told me Rio Blanco county is putting in fiber to a lot of towns with small populations like Meeker, a town of 2000! Go here to verify Meeker population: http://www.townofmeeker.org/

Now go here and see what they have done: https://www.cimarrontelecommunications.com/

1GB synchronous service, meaning the upload speed is the same as the download, 1GB speed is only $70 a month! Go to the FAQ page and click on cost: https://www.cimarrontelecommunications.com/faq/

Now call your local provider and see if they have fiber, synchronous service, and if they even have 1GB speed, ask how much?

Not to mention Musk's SpaceX Low Earth Satellite constellation to cover everywhere on Earth.  Soon to be in full operation. But since that is going to be usable for RVrs, you'll see that here being yay'd or nay'd.

Kirk, nothing can bring back fossil fuels, they are on the way out like the plants and animals that decayed and formed the oil and gas we have now.

There is no excuse for rural Americans to not have high speed >100Mbps Internet at prices rivaling what folks in a town of 2000 in the NW corner of our beautiful state.

It is being done where folks want and need it. Five years and we will see lots of trouble for the business folks that thought their oil, cable, cell Internet golden geese were going to lay golden eggs for them forever. The only thing inevitable is change.

 

 

Edited August 29, 2020 by RV_

[Randyretired]

There are a few small towns in Colorado that have good internet but not many.  Additionally there are a lot of people outside of towns and cities.  The best and  only internet we can get is Hughes Net and it is slow and costly.  Can't wait for Star Link!

[RV_]

Randy, me too!

Rio Blanco county is rolling it out to the whole county. They just started late 2018 when I started searching for our Colorado new home. I was looking again but just got a call that the kids will be moving back to here after their Germany fun. He graduated HS at Bitburg AFB Germany which has since closed. I am all for staying to be close to them post COVID.

Edited August 29, 2020 by RV_

[mptjelgin]

We have a lot outside of the small Texas town of Medina, about 60 miles west of San Antonio.  The local electric coop (Bandera Electric Coop) rolled out fiber internet a couple of years ago and it reached us in November. We now have fiber right into the modem, 1GB up and down. Pretty remarkable for such a sparsely populated area.