No Stake
Concepts are driving the new economy. Uber, with operations in 10,500 cities, is one of the fastest growing transportation companies in the world. Facebook is an online social networking service company. Airbnb operates a web-based hospitality marketing service company. Google LLC is a multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services. What do these corporations have in common? Notwithstanding that they are the largest growing corporations in the world, none of them build or make anything in the traditional sense. Uber doesn’t own a car, Airbnb has no hotels, Facebook creates no content and Google makes no products.
There are many questions about how this will affect the market in terms of trade, manufacturing and growth. Facebook, for example, is losing market share to Snap Chat. If kids today don’t use Facebook how will they find future customers? The answer may be for Facebook to make major acquisitions, gobbling up companies with even newer concepts. Uber has competition from Lyft, a San Francisco-based ride sharing company. Lyft is just starting to gain a foothold in the market, and they in turn will have future competitors as more and more businesses find their way into the new economy. Yellow Cab, a long standing member of the New York City transportation market, may want to create a hybrid using both traditional and contemporary concepts. Regardless of their current success, the fact remains that companies built around new concepts, without property or a tangible business, have to face the same challenges as conventional businesses. You can’t rewrite economic laws any more than you can rewrite the laws of physics. All companies face market saturation, all have cultural issues and all face the challenge of even newer concepts.
