Tech companies of 2015

(Business Insider/Eugene Kim) Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff welcomes Uber CEO Travis Kalanick into the winners' circle.
Investors and technology enthusiasts focus on the new: New companies, products, and technologies.

But the real runaway successes — the hundred-billion-dollar companies — come when a tech product has become such an integral part of everybody's lives that nobody thinks about it anymore. It's just there.

Think about the Windows PC. The web browser. Google. The iPhone.

In 2015, there weren't a lot of great new tech products or categories. What was the iPhone of this year? The Apple Watch? Hoverboards? Please.

Mostly, existing products and companies consolidated their gains.

These five companies exemplified that trend. None of them rocked the world with a new product or category, but all of them quietly consolidated and are well-positioned to dominate in 2016.

Uber

This was the year that the world's largest "startup" became part of the standard vocabulary in the US, like Google did in the last decade. "Let's get an Uber" has replaced "Let's call a cab." Uber has even become common in hip-hop lyrics.

Behind the scenes, Uber continued its clever strategy of making its app available anywhere and everywhere — an expensive prospect that few other app companies bother with — and so far it hasn't been dented by lawsuits that seek to force it to reclassify its drivers as employees rather than contractors.

One of Uber's earliest competitors, Sidecar, just threw in the towel. The other big one, Lyft, keeps raising money, but outside of San Francisco and techies in a few other cities like Austin, nobody calls a Lyft. They call an Uber. Lyft's main play now is teaming up with international competitors like Didi (China) and Ola (India) to stop Uber's expansion into those countries.

Barring some major black swan — a huge global downturn that makes it impossible to raise cash to cover its expansionary burn, some major legal or personnel setback — look for 2016 to be the year where Uber vanquishes all doubt. One big tech winner emerges from the ranks of startups in every generation — Amazon from the dot-com era, Facebook from the web 2.0 era. Uber is the winner of the current post-recession era.

Uber is still private and restricts its stock trading, but its most recent valuation of $62.5 billion puts it into pretty good company:

(Statista) 

Facebook

Facebook was already ubiquitous in most people's lives before this year, but the company consolidated its gains in 2015, expanding beyond a place where people share news about their families and into one of the top communications companies in the world.

Forget Apple's iMessage — Facebook doesn't even have a mobile-phone platform and its Messenger app — which is just getting started — and WhatsApp apps reach more than a billion people between them.

Instagram has replaced Facebook as the social app of choice among teens — which is fine, since Facebook owns it. Facebook is turning into one of the top destinations — alongside Google's YouTube — for online video. It's also scaring the pants off of the media industry as it becomes the top way people share news stories.

But perhaps the best evidence of Facebook's consolidation over social media can be seen relative to its two biggest competitors. Twitter's number of monthly average users stalled this year, and it went through a troublesome CEO change and layoffs. LinkedIn is doing better — its monthly average user base grew 11% between Q3 2015 and a year before — but it's a fraction of Facebook's size, at around 100 million monthly users, versus 1.55 billion for Facebook.