I agree they have a major money-spinner in their patent rights. But …
Depending on elmo’s personal trajectory the brand name may become toxic. The OP is a little vague on whether they’re interested in trade names, corporate successors, product lines, or what.
I could easily imagine Tesla’s patent portfolio continuing to generate lots of licensing revenue under some nondescript name that has no presence in the general public’s consciousness.
Just like nearly nobody who owns a mobile phone knows how much money they paid to Qualcomm to have it. Qualcomm is now a B2B (mostly) patent farm and little else with near zero name recognition unless you’re a techie in an adjacent biz.
How would the Western automakers be able to stay competitive, though? The Chinese have the raw materials, the government support, the integrated supply chain, the lower costs of living, the market size, the geopolitical ties, the manufacturing know-how, the robotics, the suppliers, the skilled labor, the cultural and educational focus on STEM… while we just have last century’s cars and panicked ethnonationalist protectionism.
The US used to be able to attract foreign scientists, academics, investors, and inventors, but all of that is very quickly changing. We’re giving up our R&D lead, especially in anything that isn’t directly AI-related. Maybe we still have a lead on self-driving robots for now, but for how long?
Meanwhile China spent the last few decades scaling up their economy, education, governance, energy infrastructure, geopolitical investments, and manufacturing capacity. They’ve focused the economic output of a billion people into future energy, future infra, and future manufacturing, while we were busy fighting culture wars and clutching onto the technologies of the 1800s and 1900s.
Our automakers make huge, pointless trucks with US flags emblazoned on them. What they sell isn’t quality or usability, but virtue signaling. Meanwhile Chinese EVs are better and cheaper and sold all over the world already, despite being in their mere infancy.
It took China a few huge revolutions, including literal ones, to overhaul their entire culture and governance to get to this point. Meanwhile in the US, every forward-looking national initiative is rolled back and then gutted with every other presidency, one step forward and two steps back. We’re headed into the same sort of corrupt, useless oligopoly that once killed our former competitors… absent any sort of national focus or leadership, how would last century’s automakers suddenly jump into the new era? They tiptoed into it only to give up as soon as the EV credits and political support went away, while the rest of the world steadily marches on. We’re choosing to get left behind — with half the country cheering it on just to own the libs.
It’s funny how our most advanced auto plants are mostly all foreign-owned already, employing American labor just to skirt tariffs. In a generation or two, we’ll just be another backward country that the first world comes to for cheap labor and an ignorant, compliant workforce.
For the sake of this thread let’s just assume it’s companies that fall out of the public eye. I assume that companies like NEC, Agfa,Fisher and Palm(Pilot) still exist but they dropped out of our collective lives.
I would not be surprised if Marvel or DC stop publishing actual print comic books–they seem to make most of their money from movies and other merchandising.
So next you are going to be telling us about the death of LP records because of the superiority of the CD and streaming formats? [something many of us predicted a couple decades ago]
I well admit I could be wrong BUT both Marvel and DC are owned by major multimedia corporations (Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery respectively) and I could easily some corporate executive deciding to end publishing actual comics.
To be clear I would NOT take a huge bet on it happening but I would NOT be surprised either.
Hell, there’s not much comparison betwen ca. 2016 DSLR photos and smarphone photos, if you’re willing and able to spend a little time in post-processing. The DSLR photos are sharper, more accurate, and have more resolution in general than smartphone photos. And I’m speaking as someone with a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, which is no slouch in the smartphone photo game. But it only pulls even with my Canon T2i, and doesn’t quite compare to my Nikon D5500.
Of course, the big difference is that the smartphone photos are good, and they’re ready to rock right after they’re taken. Which is a big advantage. But in terms of absolute quality, the D5500 and the Sigma 50mm f1.4 ART blow the smartphone away.
I imagine modern-day mirrorless cameras by Sony/Fujifilm/Canon/Nikon absolutely pummel the smartphones in every way. The main difference is that for $1000, you get a phone/hand computer/camera that’s 70% of the way toward a mirrorless camera that costs about the same amount of money, without any of the additional functionality.
I mean, my smartphone takes amazing photos. No doubt about it. But it’s not better than my old T2i from 2011; it’s just about equal and a lot more convenient. The D5500 is better across the board, but both it and the T2i take a bit of time and effort in DXO Photolab to make them look their best.
Of course, I’m going in the opposite direction and concentrating mostly on my Rebel 2000 and my super-old-school Kodak Medalist II medium format (6x9) camera these days. There’s something that’s just more fun and challenging about old-school mechanical film cameras these days. Any idiot can take a smartphone shot and have it come out halfway decent. But using a ca. 1946 manual camera that has eight shots per roll makes it a whole different game.
the best smartphone photos are “very good”, those of DSLRs are “excellent+” - nobody doubt the DSLRs are better - that is not the point.
The point is … for 99.5% of all applications the smartphone photos are “good enough”. And that is the problem for hardware-producers/sellers, that now need to live off that 0.5% of the market, instead of 80% or so like they did 15 years ago.*)
That fact also translated (to a more violent extent) into an adjacent business: Video … now that is a market that is really killed to death by the phones. When was the last time you saw a tourist with a handycam thingy in his hands???
*) 99.5% is a made up number, but not too far off, I venture
The problem isn’t with the camera but the person behind it; most of us have no idea how to properly use a professional SLR camera. I don’t even use many of the features on my iPhone 17’s camera.
Of course not, but from an engineering point of view it’s not all that impressive. Anything can take great photos with a massive lens, huge sensor, and giant flash.
Smartphones take great photos and videos despite this. The HW and SW pipelines after capture are much more sophisticated than what’s on a DSLR. And a couple seconds later you have a multi frame capture that’s aligned, tone mapped to HDR, de-noised, and ready to by shared. As @bump said almost everyone is happy with that.
It’s absolutely amazing how much smartphones cameras have progressed in 15 years.
From doing a little AI assisted research on Nikon sales, it looks like camera sales ramped up in the mid 80s through the mid 90s, then fell off by the early 2000s. Most, but not all of that was point and shoot cameras.
Then at about the same time that film died, the digital cameras went bananas. Like by the time film was discontinued, they were already selling as many digital cameras as they had been film ones, and then it shot up from there until about 2013, and the bottom fell out of the digital p&s market.
The DSLR/Mirrorless market is oddly (or maybe not) very similar in terms of sales volume as prior to the film boom. Which implies that they’re back to supplying pros and enthusiasts. There’s one caveat - today’s cameras are much higher value, so they make more money than they used to.
Did you mean film boom? Or digital camera boom? Not disputing the point – just trying to understand.
Looks like 2025 saw a rare increase in digital camera shipments; up to 9.44M. This is just under 2000’s 10.82M. I would guess this is driven by enthusiasts upgrading to mirrorless. Just a WAG.
Smartphone shipments in 2025 were down to 1.25B. Digital camera shipments are 0.8% of mobile. Unless you count imagers, where phones have 2-5 each.
As an aside, there are quite a few flagship mobile devices, primarily in PRC, with 1" sensors.
Anyway not arguing any point; just sharing interesting data.
With how Discord has decided to require everyone worldwide to verify their age using photos or government ID, and the overwhelmingly negative reaction to it - including the mass cancellations of subscriptions to Nitro, which is how they make money - I suspect that Discord isn’t long for this world.
