> Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are the first three publicly traded U.S. companies to hit $1 trillion in market value.
> Google parent Alphabet Inc. became the fourth U.S. company ever to achieve a $1 trillion market value Thursday
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).
It's interesting to look at a history of the biggest firms.
- America's Top 50 Companies 1917-2017 [1]
- A Century of America's Top 10 Companies, in One Chart [2]
- Top 15 Largest U.S. Companies by Revenue (1954-2018) [3] (video 5')
(Note: the USA is best documented and as the world's #1 GDP for a century it's a good sample of leading trends).
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.
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 centuries; Microsoft is as strong as it's ever been with all things enterprise; Amazon is, well, Amazon.
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?
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.
That's too bad. Out of the other $1T US companies (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) Google seems by far the most user hostile. I would say Microsoft once held this position but lost their edge to be truly damaging. On the other hand Google:
* Sells ads for a living
* Pushes AMP
* Removes features from Chrome that allow you to block ads
* Android littered with spyware
* Kills products randomly
* Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)
* Horrible hiring culture cargo-culted by lesser Googles
AMP may tie publishers into their standard, but as a user I'd much prefer an AMP page to a dog slow publisher page on mobile.
Despite all the hype and FUD, ad blockers still work just fine in Chrome.
iOS has plenty of hidden spy apps, masque attacks, and iCloud backup attacks.
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
Plenty of privacy concerns with Amazon and Microsoft. Remains to be seen if Apple caves on the Pensacola iPhones.
Not sure how workplace politics or culture affects the user experience at all, sounds like you might be confusing your own prejudices with users at large.
Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
Apple refuses to interoperate with industry standards, Google does not.
> AMP may tie publishers into their standard, but as a user I'd much prefer an AMP page to a dog slow publisher page on mobile.
As a user I couldn't disagree more. When I go to a URL I want the content behind that URL. I don't read bloated garbage sites anyway, but even there I'd prefer the real site to the AMP Google-ware.
> iOS has plenty of hidden spy apps, masque attacks, and iCloud backup attacks.
Hidden spy apps? Would love to hear your source on that. None of these compare to the absolutely toxic Android ecosystem.
> Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
Nothing these companies has done rivals Google here. How many Google chat products have there been?
> Plenty of privacy concerns with Amazon and Microsoft. Remains to be seen if Apple caves on the Pensacola iPhones.
Google's business model is removing privacy.
> Not sure how workplace politics or culture affects the user experience at all, sounds like you might be confusing your own prejudices with users at large.
What prejudices would those be? I didn't even state a position other than they inject politics everywhere, which is undeniable.
> Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
Irrelevant.
> Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
Amazon sells physical products, Google sells ads.
> Apple refuses to interoperate with industry standards, Google does not.
This is true about Apple but it's also true about Google. RSS anyone? Gmail's embrace/extend/extinguish of email protocols. AMP.
I also think it's funny that my post went from +8 to flagged overnight. How many Google employees does it take to flag a popular post? Only you offered any sort of rebuttal to my statements but obviously many agree.
While you may be technically right in many of these points, what you say misses or purposefully deflects points from the parent. For example:
> [Google] Sells ads for a living
>> Microsoft, Amazon and Apple also sell ads.
Parent is not stating that the companies do not sell ads, parent is stating that Google primarily makes its money by selling ads. Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple do not.
> [Google] Kills products randomly
> [Google] Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)
>> Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
There is a difference between deprecating and "killing" as the parent puts it, and unlike Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, Google has a website dedicated to its many killed products [1], primarily because Google has a pretty bad reputation for killing a product randomly without much notice.
Beyond those, you're being disingenuous with at least these two points:
> Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
> Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
You're technically correct but that's because 1) Google products aren't accessible in China, and 2) Google doesn't really sell physical products like Amazon does (if you don't count some devices like phones). That's like saying, assuming Elmer's Glue isn't in China, that "Microsoft censors their products in China, Elmer's Glue does not."
