Whoever makes such devices will therefore control access to users. But it will probably involve new physical devices that will supersede the smartphone as the dominant means of connecting people to information and services. The problem is that nobody knows what it will be. Yet past performance is not indicative of future results, and now all of them are limbering up for whatever comes next. Apple and Alphabet are now larger than were US Steel and Standard Oil, the two mighty monopolies of the 1900s, measured by profits relative to domestic GDP. The pandemic has boosted demand, from bored couch-surfers to startups in need of cloud computing. The MAAMAs spent the 2010s fortifying commanding positions, in business tools for Microsoft, e-commerce for Amazon, social media for Meta, and so on. Nokia, once seemingly invincible in mobile devices, fumbled the shift to smartphones. In 1983 IBM was America’s most profitable firm but eight years later was loss-making after botching the move from mainframes to PCs. Fairchild Semiconductor ruled in the 1950s but now exists only in books. They also have an eye on the history of technology, which is littered with once-dominant firms that were brought down not by regulators, but by missing the next big thing. So they are all looking to swoop into new territory. The shift reflects a fear that the lucrative fiefs of the 2010s are losing relevance, and the fact that tech’s titans are increasingly moving onto each other’s patches (the share of sales that overlap has doubled since 2015 to 40%). Together, they have invested $280bn in the past year, equivalent to 9% of American business investment, up from 4% five years ago.īig tech wants to find the next big opportunity, and our analysis of deals, patents, recruitment and other yardsticks shows that cash is flowing into everything from driverless cars to quantum computing. These decisions are part of a vast new investment surge at five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft-call them MAAMA. On January 18th Microsoft, worth more than $2trn, decided it wasn’t big enough and bid $69bn for Activision Blizzard, a video-games firm, in its biggest-ever deal. IS THERE ANY limit to the ambition and hubris of big tech firms? In October Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and described humankind’s new future in virtual worlds.
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