The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.