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Mature industries generally come to be dominated by a few big players, and the Internet is no exception. The big players define the environment and the platforms that everyone else has to deal with; resistance is generally futile, until the next era comes along, usually many years later.
On the heels of third quarter earnings announcements, the WSJ has a piece reflecting on how much of commercial Internet activity is dominated by five companies:
- Amazon (e-commerce, cloud services)
- Apple (mobile, music/TV services)
- Google/Alphabet (search, mobile, online video)
- Facebook (social networking)
- Microsoft (consumer/enterprise desktop platform, cloud services)
This dominance didn't occur overnight.
Not coincidentally, all five companies beat analysts' earnings estimates for Q3. Microsoft, dealing with the continued decline of PC software, managed to make up for it through the impressive growth of its Azure cloud business.
Business Insider has a related piece on Amazon's dominance of the cloud segment; Microsoft is in second place, IBM and Google are struggling to keep up, and everyone else is basically tied for last.
We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Get the picture? You laughing now?
- Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 08 2015, @02:26PM
Google: DuckDuckGo. Also, Clean Links add-on.
Youtube: Umm... porn sites?
Apple: Pirate Bay. And (gasp) your local public library. For mobile, I would say Android, but that's Google again.
Facebook: Who really needs them? And, maybe Linked In?
Amazon: NewEgg for consumer goods. For the cloud services, uh, why did you stop buying your own hardware, isn't that more secure?
Microsoft: Linux, of course. Or FreeBSD.
ebay: What, feebay isn't one of the rulers of the Internet? Well, there is Craigslist, but want to avoid them too?
(Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Sunday November 08 2015, @05:02PM
Personally I do without four of the big five listed. Google, however, is insidious. Much harder to avoid than any of the others, at least for me because of who my associates are.
While it's easy enough to make use of other search engines, it's their other services that I get roped into. gmail addresses are ubiquitous. Google Docs are used for a couple of projects I've been roped into, for mobile devices ... quite frankly Android seems the least bad of the lot compared between android, ios, and windows mobile. Open firmware and third party app stores are the order of the day, and they don't always get the job done.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.