Many in the tech industry have strongly felt that the tech giants in the United States are most vulnerable to companies in the technology sector in developing international countries. Not so, says Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) co-founder Evan Williams.
Speaking at the Quartz conference in Seattle, Williams disagreed with this popular sentiment, saying that it isn’t common for any one company, service or group to completely dominate the market worldwide. Instead, Williams floated the opinion that people can be globally connected and using different services or companies without posing a threat to one another.
Of particular discussion are emerging companies in Asia. Alibaba, a Chinese tech company that covers many different bases and markets in Asia, is preparing to host a very large public offering in the US. This is considered to be a potential threat to several existing US tech giants.
Williams hasn’t spoken to threats to any single company or market, including Twitter, but rather spoke in more general terms. As Asian companies break into the US market, the impact will then be determined, but until then, Williams felt that it was too soon to point to any one area or sector as a “threat.”
For Twitter, use in the US is very high and is expected to level off as soon as next year. When this plateau is reached, it will be critical for Twitter to explore expansion into the international emerging markets, including India and Indonesia which are on track to become the third and fourth largest Twitter user groups worldwide in 2014.
The internet is very clearly a global entity and is no longer centered around the United States. As tech companies worldwide develop, we can expect to see significant changes to the way we use the internet and communicate in the US and around the globe.
