When 2018 started, not many analysers had realised that the “sentiment” around the I.T. industry was changing.
By the time the year ended, what happened was before everyone’s eyes:
- Amazon went under scrutiny for the workforce treatment,
- Facebook was investigated for the mess surrounding many recent elections, fake news and privacy invasion,
- Google was criticised from multiple angles, from sexual misconduct, to cooperating with dictatorships, to links with controversial technological projects
While some of these points weren’t entirely new, they reached a new magnitude.
Under the changed climate, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix all suffered losses between 25% and 50% of their respective stock value.