For the average person, it’s hard to imagine a world where the GAMA are not so utterly dominant. However, there’s clearly a precedent of “nothing lasts for ever” in tech with former incumbents such as IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft, and many others losing their grip of their quasi-monopolistic market positions. Do you see a near future where today’s GAMA shuffle to become a different acronym (or doing away with big 4 acronyms altogether)? If so, what are the events that will lead up to it and who will be the first to go?<p>Note, not arguing that they should be taken down a notch necessarily, but rather more interested in the economic arguments of whether it’s possible or even likely.
It’s already happened to Facebook. Zuckerberg would love to trade his company for TikTok and their version of the ‘metaverse’ is cruelly mocked in all corners.<p>Amazon is slipping. In the last two years they quit delivering Prime packages in two days in much of the US. Most other retailers have sped up their deliveries in this time frame. Customers are starting to notice. Everything AMZN has pioneered is now widespread in business. For instance AWS was fresh once but Azure is a peer.<p>Netflix is just another movie studio no.
Nobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will.<p>Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense.<p>It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming wave of DeGlobalization and supply chain restructuring.<p>The editor of the Atlantic in his introduction said "The perfection of these pacific instruments <i>should be the first objective</i> of our scientists as they emerge from their war work." Yet here we are, 70+ years later with that vision unfulfilled.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...</a>
> IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft(...) Do you see a near future where today’s FAANG shuffle to become a different acronym<p>By market cap the six largest US tech companies are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla and Meta (in that order). Netflix is number 71 on the list (of all companies, not just tech); it's smaller than Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce etc.<p>'FAANG' catching on as an acronym doesn't say all that much about these companies as a group.
It never/always will.<p>The acronyms are ever changing when you expand the scope to other industries and historical time periods. Big 5 Hollywood Studios of the 40’s, Robber Barons, Rockefellers, Telecoms of the 90’s are just a few that come to my mind without reaching for sources. But you could probably look back further at Rothschilds and the trade companies responsible for colonization and slave trade even. Anywhere, where disembodied capital seeks to maximize profits.<p>We’ve been here already, and we will again. Not much more than 15 years ago all of the companies in the GAMA acronym were companies we were mostly rooting for. Now they’re the “big ones.”<p>I don’t think there will ever be a single threshold moment to witness. Some of them will fade in or out, others will abruptly merge or splinter. They’re really just temporary holographic systems of meanings. The people, the talent, the product and capital move around dynamically.
I'm <i>not</i> an economist, just some random techie.<p>I don't think you can lump all of GAMA together. I think that Meta and Twitter which rely almost entirely on advertising revenue are the most vulnerable. Google with some products and Apple with several products should be less vulnerable. Amazon covers several niches: distributor, advertiser, web services, so they are probably facing numerous challenges in the future.<p>If the headwinds in the near future intensify, then I suspect that advertising spending will reduce and thus any business that sustains itself purely on advertising revenue will have serious problems.
I would say not likely. As industries mature, incumbents acquire enough of an advantage that they don't get outcompeted, you just want until the market for their product disappears.<p>It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really. Also "take down a notch" is some pretty judgmental phrasing, as if it implies they're bigger than they deserve to be, as if they're doing something wrong.<p>Google owns search, Amazon owns retailing, Microsoft owns enterprise, and Apple owns hardware. Every market has a runner-up as well in terms of profitability (arguably Bing, Wal-Mart, Google Cloud, Dell respectively), but that's in the same way Pepsi is the eternal runner-up to Coca-Cola.<p>These markets are pretty mature now, in ways that they weren't in the days of Yahoo and AOL. In contrast, IBM was dominant for decades and only declined as eventually consumer PC's disrupted mainframes. So really you'd have to ask, what could ever fundamentally disrupt/replace search, online shopping, office software suites, or phones/laptops? It's pretty hard to imagine until something like generalized artificial intelligence comes along.
father time erodes everything. These companies really start eroding when the people who built the company die, and then you get a lot of politics and bureaucracy.
One possible future is that the increasing pressure to have data out of reach of the US under the Patriot Act will lead to powerful competitors outside the US, starting from domestic market and then expanding internationally.<p>It's already well under way in China, where US big tech isn't as prevalent and one big example of this is Aliexpress, which is known outside of China borders.
Russia is known for having local competitors as well.<p>The biggest push though is currently the GDPR, which makes it illegal to handle EU citizens data in a way that allows the US to access it.
While enforcement is super slow and non-compliance very very high, it's slowly having an impact, where EU businesses now try harder to choose EU providers to avoid that non-compliance.<p>While I don't know of a specific success-story to point out right now, I think there are good odds there will be some in the long term.<p>Note that I only talk about GDPR because I'm European, but there are similar initiatives in other countries around the world. I heard about Brazil LGPD for example.