I might not have made it to work today without the help of a few tech companies. My phone, which runs Google’s Android operating system, woke me up. I then used it to watch the news through my Google Chromecast on a television set and home theater system that I bought from Amazon. Driving to work, I listened to music that I’d purchased from Apple Inc. while using Google Maps to navigate the pervasive congestion on the roads of Austin, Texas. The first thing I did at work was to check my Twitter and Google email accounts on an Apple MacBook (likely containing some components that Stratfor’s IT department got from Amazon). And that was just the start of the day.
Of course, I’m part of a generation that depends on technology perhaps more than its predecessors do. But the reality is that a handful of tech companies have become so ubiquitous in our daily lives that their devices and algorithms are nearly inescapable. Each of the companies has become a juggernaut in its corners of the market, and their collective role in geopolitics has steadily grown to the point that it’s now practically cliche to say that big data is the new oil. The comparison is apt, though. As it was for oil companies before them — and for steel companies before that — the growth of tech firms, and the effective monopolies they’ve established in certain areas, are concerns that Washington will eventually have to address. The only questions are when and how.
Spinning a Worldwide Web of Interests
Though the internet is likely the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of tech giants such as Amazon or Facebook, the worldwide web is but the tip of the iceberg for these companies. Innovation in the tech sector is relentless. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon — the world’s five largest public companies by market capitalization — all rose to success by upending an established competitor with a game-changing platform, service or software. Within four years of launching its first search engine in 1998, Google had eclipsed Yahoo as the largest search engine. Facebook, likewise, quickly superseded Myspace as the dominant force in social media. As a result, the companies are acutely aware that they must stay on the leading edge of innovation or risk falling to an upstart competitor. The wealth of data they have at their disposal — in Google’s search histories or Amazon’s purchase records, for instance — isn’t enough to maintain their competitive advantage since it can go stale in a matter of months.
To compensate, each company has staked claims in up-and-coming technologies, often by buying smaller firms on the trail of a breakthrough. Google has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence and neural networks to underpin its data processing. Apple, whose iPhone ecosystem must compete with Google’s Android, has delved into autonomous systems. Amazon is now a leader in supply chain technologies, and it currently boasts the world’s largest cloud computing service, though it is increasingly facing challenges from Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud Platform. So while Google is still a search engine company at heart, and Amazon an online marketplace and Apple a consumer hardware firm, their investments in new technologies are taking them farther afield from their core business. And they will probably continue in this vein as technology evolves, growing as technology companies in the most general sense by expanding their diverse network of business interests and with it, their prevalence in everyday life. After all, if they don’t invest in the latest emerging technology, such as quantum computing, someone else will.
Source: http://bit.ly/2u8PBcm
