Apple may be scoring big on its quarterly results but a venture capitalist, Fred Wilson, peering through his crystal ball, predicts that Apple won't make it to the top 3 companies by 2020.
Apple, the biggest tech company, had one of the best quarters this year with sale of 20 million TV boxes, 800 million iTunes accounts, $5.2 worth App Store purchases and a net profit of $10.2 billion in Q2, 2014. But the Cupertino giant is not a part of venture capitalist Fred Wilson's vision for 2020. Five years after dumping all Apple shares, Wilson hasn't changed his views about the company's future. During a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Wilson predicted that Apple will lose its dominance to Google, Facebook "and one that we've never heard of," by 2020, TechCrunch reports.
Wilson, co-founder of New York's Union Square Ventures and one of the top tech investors in the market, first bailed out on Apple in 2009 when he cut all ties with the Cupertino tech giant by selling the shares at $91.36 each. Apple has grown massively since; it closed at $600.96 on Monday, but still has not been able to win over Wilson's trust.
Wilson backed his predictions with some facts that he said will pull Apple down so much that it will not rank among the top 3 companies in the next 5 years. "Because I think they're [Apple] just too rooted to the hardware. And I think that hardware is increasingly becoming more commodity," CNN quoted Wilson as saying at the TC Disrupt conference, Monday. "They don't have anything in the cloud to speak of, and the stuff they have in the cloud I think is largely not good. And I just don't think they think about data and the cloud in the way you need to think about things."
Wilson duly noted that Apple has lost a large margin of its mobile OS share to Google's dominating Android platform, which has managed to attract new users. Speaking to TechCrunch CEO Michael Arrington at the TC Disrupt, Wilson remained skeptical about the company. But he hopes to be an investor for another startup.
Wilson ruled out the possibility of Twitter scaling to the second or even third position, but he predicted the social network's ranking to range between four and seven or even further. The successful VC, however, made billion through his investments in Web 2.0 companies like Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare and also backs the Android platform.
