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.
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.
Netflix is just another movie studio no.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted, I wish Amazon would break apart, but that's far from the case.
Their momentum is going to work against them in the long term. Somebody who is in the Prime habit is going to order 20 items from Amazon waiting 4-7 days each time.
Someday they're going to buy something from another retailer like Adorama or Best Buy or Target or Walmart and get it the next day and say... Wow!
Amazon has the considerable advantage of having a larger catalog but who knows what fragment of the catalog is a scam.
They still have to be confident it will do so within a relatively narrow time frame in which the options premium or short interest makes it worthwhile. (I knew housing sales were going to slow down and bought put options against Whirlpool at 200... but I was off by a few months and still lost.)
The Metaverse thing is just a passion project. It's what you invent when the initial vision of your main gig (Facebook) starts going down the doldrums. Facebook is basically in maintenance mode now.
The government must intervene.
Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense.
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.
The editor of the Atlantic in his introduction said "The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work." Yet here we are, 70+ years later with that vision unfulfilled.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Stuff like NNCP might help.
The complete lack of interest in developing a truly anonymous internet is worrying.
Another thing that is sorely missing is the ease of use of the web-of-trust networks. Me and a friend on the other side of the globe meet up physically, exchange keys, then put them in our routers / home servers and suddenly we have access to each other's NAS and local networks, for example.
For now, nobody is working seriously on nothing like that. That's not good at all.
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.
'FAANG' catching on as an acronym doesn't say all that much about these companies as a group.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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 disagree, if consumer spending is reduced due to less equity valuations or less overall liquidity, then the ad spend will follow.
A recession could easily bring this about.
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.
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.
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.
And Youtube and Chrome and Android and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning via their massive data hoard
> Amazon owns retailing
And Cloud and Whole Foods and more
> Microsoft owns enterprise
And Github and VSCode and EA, Bethesda/Zenimax/Xbox game studios (Obsidian etc), and Blizzard/Activision
> Apple owns hardware
And is making a huge push into Ads, and Music, they also control their hardware at an extreme level via iOS, the App Store, etc.
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These are mega-corporations that are expanding to the overall detriment of society.
In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty.
On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch.
All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.
Coca-cola, and some of Unilever products (like Kraft cheese or Heinz ketchup) don't look great in some markets where health is a major selling point of food products and a lot of smaller competitors are coming up.
IMHO they are past their peak but, of course, they will survive for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
