Fred Wilson on the winners by the year 2020

Skip the rather lame intro of this morning's Techcrunch in New York. Expected a bit more of a show than just reading a few intros off an iPad.

But then comes Fred Wilson.

Speaking at today’s TC Disrupt conference in NYC, he predicted that the top three tech companies, instead, will be Google, Facebook “and one that we have never heard of.”

Why is Apple not in the list? Apple, he believes, is “too rooted to hardware,” with not enough tied into the cloud, and that will make it too much of a challenge for it to evolve going forward.

“I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity,” he said. “Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don’t think they think about data and the cloud.” 

The interview with Techcrunch refers to this LeWeb talk in Paris by Fred Wilson.

I agree. I must confess I am starting to get worried about Apple. Not so much that they can't really come up with much that is new, but that while the hardware may get smaller and arguably more beautiful, the application software is getting worse. It started with Final Cut Pro. But now it is creeping into Keynote and other programs I have tried to use with the latest operating system Maverick. I love my iPad2. See no real reason to upgrade. Closed my iCloud account because I couldn't see a reason for it.