So,<p>> <i>Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are the first three publicly traded U.S. companies to hit $1 trillion in market value.</i><p>> <i>Google parent Alphabet Inc. became the fourth U.S. company ever to achieve a $1 trillion market value Thursday</i><p>This is just a number obviously — E8D4A51000 in hex, 1110 1000 1101 0100 1010 0101 0001 0000 0000 0000 in binary (40 bits), 141981B87854 in the elegant base-12 (duodecimal, or "dozenal" for amateurs).<p>It's interesting to look at a history of the biggest firms.<p>- America's Top 50 Companies 1917-2017 [1]<p>- A Century of America's Top 10 Companies, in One Chart [2]<p>- Top 15 Largest U.S. Companies by Revenue (1954-2018) [3] (video 5')<p>(Note: the USA is best documented and as the world's #1 GDP for a century it's a good sample of leading trends).<p>What we see is a clear shift from primary products to intragrators — makers of final products. It's unclear to me whether "tech" should be seen as either, because software can be very low-level or very high-level, it's pervasive vertically to the whole pre-existing technology stack of civilization. Hence why, perhaps, it's so mesmerizing to us now.<p>Among the 4 companies cited here, Google is strangely the one that I'm the less confident about in terms of very-long-term prospects. Apple has clearly become a luxury brand, and these last <i>centuries</i>; Microsoft is as strong as it's ever been with all things enterprise; Amazon is, well, <i>Amazon</i>.<p>Google however, it's an engineer ethos at first (my first tech love), but it seems like corporate drove that away enough to resemble other companies (looking at Facebook, Tesla..). But said corporate management seems aimless, opportunistic more than vision-driven, more about the what/how and not a clear why. The moon projects counter-illustrate that fact but how many of those will actually become Google's main drive to rock the 2030s, 2040s, and beyond?<p>And yet, as far as the heart goes, Google is the one I'd love to become something more, it's the one I wish I had founded bar none but Musk's. I just don't see it top 10 past 2030, if even that.<p>[none of this was financial or career advice ;-)]<p>[1]: <a href="https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas-top-10-companies" rel="nofollow">https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas-top-10-co...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas-top-10-companies" rel="nofollow">https://howmuch.net/articles/100-years-of-americas-top-10-co...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MSQ6n-3YA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MSQ6n-3YA</a>