This Presentation Shows What Makes The World's Biggest Tech Companies So Successful

Here's the intro slide...

This is an abridged version of another deck Dawson has done in the past.

The main things to know about a successful business: it has a profitable core business, and it competes across a number of other categories to create a powerful ecosystem.

There are 6 major domains: Hardware, Software, Content, Communications, Connectivity, and the Digital Layer.

Here's a definition of each category.

A highly profitable core business gives a company the opportunity to invest in other stuff.

Each of these companies has a highly profitable core that funds their other activities.

Cores are different for different companies . Not every major tech company derives its high margins from the same sector – in fact, there's a wide range of sources for these high margins.

Each of these companies has also expanded out into the other domains, building way beyond its profitable core.

Amazon is the exception to the rule among the largest consumer technology companies, sharing with the rest of the retail world relatively low margins, and suffers as a result.

There are two fundamental business model types – those where products or services are directly monetized, and those where they are not monetized.

Here are three ways to make money for companies.

There are two direct ways to make money: Subscriptions and one-time sales.

Across software, hardware and content, subscription models are starting to take over from one-off sales models.

Business models where products and services are not directly monetized usually fall into one of three categories: bundling, channel or data.

Here are some examples of different products and different monetization models.

Certain business models – notably advertising and data – create tension between the user of the product or service and those paying the bills, while other models align users and customers perfectly. This has implications for user satisfaction.

Here's where the money comes from for the biggest tech companies.

Here's where Google's money comes from for its various products.

Software is eating the world, but there's more to the story...

Some examples of software which is being monetized in other ways, such as advertising, hardware purchases or subscription services.

A ballpark summary of the annual revenue opportunity in various categories and sub-categories, within the consumer technology market.

Margins are highly variable by company, but certain categories and sub-categories tend to be far more profitable than others.

Putting the revenue and margin pictures together at a category level shows where some of the most lucrative opportunities lie.

Most hardware businesses have low margins, but there are exceptions like Apple and Samsung.

Ecosystems emerge as companies start to build value around their products and services by creating synergies between devices and other products, and by bring third parties on board.

All of the big, successful consumer technology companies have eventually began to compete across major categories

Competition in consumer tech hardware is extending to new domains, including the body, the home and the car, either with new hardware or with extensions of existing hardware to provide interfaces in new settings.

Apple, Google and Microsoft are competing across these three new domains as well as in legacy computing, and Samsung is arguably trying to build a similarly broad platform.

One of the keys to success for an ecosystem is its scale – this slide shows the scale of various major ecosystems.

Most successful consumer technology companies end up moving beyond single products to become category companies and then to building ecosystems.

This slide shows how Apple has slowly transformed itself from a single-product company into a category company and now an ecosystem company, with activities across five of the six domains.

Here are the things to remember from this presentation.

Dawson's info...

Now hear Jan Dawson's take on Apple.

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