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 mhajicek on Sunday November 08 2015, @10:09AM
If you have proprietary, confidential, or classified data you CANNOT in good conscience store it in the cloud.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @11:19AM
Why not simply encrypt it in the cloud? Decrypt on site.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday November 08 2015, @11:30AM
Who needs conscience these days, no matter if good or bad? It doesn't pay the mortgage, doesn't put food on the table, doesn't get you laid.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday November 08 2015, @11:48AM
i recall reading that the CIA basically had Amazon build a miniature AWS in a their own datacenter. so sure, you can... as long as you own the entire cloud and only you can connect to it. :)
(Score: 4, Informative) by linkdude64 on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:05PM
As it was wisely put, there is no such thing as the cloud, only somebody else's computer.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:20PM
I don't think I know anybody like that [xkcd.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:04PM
Did you?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:37PM
It's pretty hard to avoid the Googs since they own YouTube. Other video hosting sites just don't have the established userbase.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:37PM
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday November 08 2015, @08:18PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @08:29PM
Currently DuckDuckGo. Use basically anything but google.
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Sunday November 08 2015, @09:12PM
Google is nearly impossible to avoid because, as said above, of YouTube. Want to watch a video? Odds are great that it's on YouTube. Other than YouTube though, I manage to avoid Google.
Amazon I give money to for digital comic books and graphic novels (Comixology), eBooks, and Kindles mostly. It has no real competitor in the digital comic books and graphic novels market. The only real competitor it has left in the eBooks and eReaders arena is Kobo (at least in the United States), and their customer service is nowhere near the level as Amazon's. Plus, Amazon Prime is hard to beat.
Apple I give money to simply because it has the best tablets and best tablet OS. Sorry, Android tablets don't cut it, at least not for me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by CirclesInSand on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:39PM
5 companies that "rule" the internet? Ha what a joke. If anyone owns the internet, it is 1 company: Akamai [wikipedia.org]
Akamai's content delivery network is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic.
Considering how often everyone connects to their servers, and how no one knows about them, I wonder what kind of sociological phenomenon their obscurity is.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:04PM
Akamai might be the equivalent of the printing press, but then the 5 companies listed are the editors. The ones who directly control and steer not only policy, but access to the information that Akamai serves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:44PM
Oops, forgot the link to the WSJ piece. I meant to put this at the start of the second paragraph:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/giants-tighten-grip-on-internet-economy-1446771732 [wsj.com]
BTW, this is one of the frustrations of submitting something. Quite often you find a glaring error, but there's no good way to communicate that to the editors. Copying the submission in the queue loses all the embedded links.
Of course, one solution is to be extremely well organized and thorough like hpickens.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @06:38PM
Quarter. That's it. A nice *QUARTER*. They're on top now. TFA's claim that they can't be knocked off that perch is a bit dicier. Social media and consumer products (Apple) are fickle. Just look at Digg or Sony for examples. Tech dominance? Look at the descent of Cisco and Oracle. Microsoft's had a pretty hideous last 15 years, considering they used to be 'THE' company, but they're growing again. Amazon is turning retail on it's ear, but Amazon's cloud infrastructure has pricing that seems to be caught in a race toward the bottom. Either is full of uncertainty 10 years out.
Meanwhile, AT&T, GE, Exxon, and the pre-tech stalwarts are more steady businesses, not nearly as volatile. And meanwhile, there are tech trends: autonomous systems, 3d construction. I'm optimistic about most of these companies, but I wouldn't remotely consider them unassailable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @07:00PM
Dude. It's always been about the quarter. Chiming in with the fact that it isn't the quarter that matters is like saying it's not that the candy tastes good, but what its made out of. No one cares.
There are charts and diagrams and statements about "past performance doesn't mean future profits" and yeah, but I will tell you this: what MS did 15 years ago doesn't really matter today, so don't look at that. What they did a quarter ago affects their stock price today. Maybe what they did 15 years ago allowed them to do what they did this most recent quarter, but no one uses metrics that way.
All of the other companies you mentioned I invested in and lost money. If you want to froth, you have to bubble. The cream will rise to the top along with the scum; the bubble will pop and spray everyone with a mix of creamy scum that will go more rancid than the scum itself. It happened before and it won't be long until it happens again.
So pump and dump or be a chump like everyone else that holds on.
No, I don't like it. But history repeats itself, people will freak and dump when things are cheap, and smart people will start scooping up that fertilizer/shit to grow more creamy scum.
MS has a great tactic, anyway. Give away the ad delivery service for free and then prevent anyone from being able to do anything about it. They will get used to it at home, and with BYOD demand support for it at work, and soon the workstation images at work will be windows 10 if they aren't already from the impulsive people with local admin rights.
MS figured out that if you give complicated tools to admins, paper certs wont use them. So they won't. It will all be sucked into the cloud and there will be little with the technical capability to stop it because good people are too expensive to retain, and the rampant cheating for MS certs has watered down the skill set available from the selection that I don't even know any that pursue it any more -- except for maybe kids on tomshardware that haven't learned that an A+ will actually provide better skills.
Bet your money on Facebook, Google, and MS to deliver the ads, and bet your money on Google, Apple and Amazon to sell what's in the ads. Apple is a little more opaque about the ad delivery, but just because they are not doing it on an OS level at present doesn't mean you aren't getting ads as a result of their data collection.
There is absolutely no surprise in this valuation and stock returns--invest into it while you can before it bursts.