Time Capsule: Trends in Tech, Product Strategy

Course details

Learn from history, or be condemned to repeat it.

• Why did GroupOn, Yahoo and MySpace die, while AirBnB, Google and Facebook thrived?
• How did Apple come back from the dead in 2000 to become the world's most valuable and profitable company?
• Why did Korean companies - Samsung and LG - emerge as a leader in mobile phone manufacturing in the early 2000s?

This course seeks to answer questions like this. The technology industry is incredibly fast-moving. Companies and trends that were dominant in 2011 don't even really exist any more. Yet through all of the changes in the past two decades, some recurring patterns emerge. This course quickly studies the past two decades, and summarizes some key trends. It rounds off with some specific ideas on how an individual - or a company - can deal with these trends.

• 1994 - 2003: Surfing and portals and display ads define the internet, as epitomized by Yahoo, MSN and AOL
• 2003 - 2008: 'Search-Find-Obtain' is the way folks use the internet; Google and Amazon are the big winners
• 2005 - present: China's tech usage patterns diverge significantly, and giants such as Alibaba and Tencent emerge
• 2008 - 2012: Smartphone usage explodes; Apple gets it right and becomes the most valuable company in the world
• 2012 - present: 'Share-Discover' becomes the dominant usage pattern; Facebook, Uber and AirBnB are big winners as users become comfortable with 
• 2008 - present: Winner-takes-all is the norm - both for companies (the big 5 tech firms get bigger and more profitable) and for individuals (social mobility declines in many countries)

Viewed with this context, the big trends of today - Big Data, Cloud Computing and Machine Learning all make sense. 

Using discussion forums

Please use the discussion forums on this course to engage with other students and to help each other out. Unfortunately, much as we would like to, it is not possible for us at Loonycorn to respond to individual questions from students:-(

We're super small and self-funded with only 2 people developing technical video content. Our mission is to make high-quality courses available at super low prices.

The only way to keep our prices this low is to *NOT offer additional technical support over email or in-person*. The truth is, direct support is hugely expensive and just does not scale.

We understand that this is not ideal and that a lot of students might benefit from this additional support. Hiring resources for additional support would make our offering much more expensive, thus defeating our original purpose.

It is a hard trade-off.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!