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The 2020 Plan: Tech Companies Continue To Innovate

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Adam Wilson
The 2020 Plan: Tech Companies Continue To Innovate

2020 will be the beginning of the tech industry’s radical revisioning of the physical world. These days it’s easy to bemoan the state of innovation and the dynamism coming from America’s cradle of technological development in Silicon Valley. The same companies that were praised for reimagining how people organized and accessed knowledge, interacted publicly, shopped for goods are the same ones doubling down on growth in a time of economic pain.

The largest tech companies are continuing a pattern. In previous recessions, those that invested while the economy was at its most vulnerable often emerged stronger. In the 1990s, IBM used a recession to reorient itself from a hardware company into a software and services company. Google and Facebook both rose out of the dot-com bust about 20 years ago. 

Google And Tech Companies Innovate

Other technology giants are engaging in similar behavior today. Apple has bought at least four companies this year and released a new iPhone. Microsoft has purchased three cloud computing businesses. Amazon is in talks to acquire an autonomous vehicle start-up, has leased more airplanes for delivery and has hired an additional 175,000 people since March. Google has unveiled new messaging and video features. “I’ve always believed that in times of economic downturn, the right thing to do is keep investing in building the future,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a recent investor call.. “When the world changes quickly, people have new needs, and that means there are more new things to build.”

Technology companies have become a dominant driver in recent years of economic growth, consumer tastes and the financial markets. The biggest tech stocks as a group, for example, have dramatically outpaced the broader market in the past decade. That's because technology has reshaped in a major way how people communicate, consume information, shop, socialize, and work.

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