Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook will all go away within 50 years, says author

Especially Google and Facebook area extremely well positioned to know what is happening. They have a market research machinery never seen in history. If there's a new trendy thing catching up, they can see it coming and they know exactly who is interested. As long as governments don't intervene, they are in quite strong position to just acquire threats (or develop something similar).

Apple has piles of cash, but I think their business is kind of fragile. The valuation is based on being able to create products which sell for very high premium. I don't see them going away, but they might dropped from their top position.

For the Facebook and Google I believe the major risk is some backslash from legislation/privacy. Something like this would not wipe them out, but it might seriously damage the business. For example with Google there could be pressure to separate the search and advertising or to allow other companies to also offer ads on the search platform.

Begone, foul clickbait headline that thinks it can excuse itself by putting a question mark at the end.

Aside from a few exceptions, I don't wish death on any big companies. I would nevertheless like to see each of the named company's dominance reduced substantially if only to see what the alternatives look like once afforded some breathing room. As much as network effects are an inevitable part of the human condition, I rail against the behavior as the very small market actor I am. In my day-to-day market activities, I regularly seek out less-dominant vendors and service providers.

Of the named companies, I am most comfortable with Amazon. Most interactions I have with Amazon yield a tangible service predicated on me being the customer. While some alternatives provide better browsing and discovery, there are few online shopping sites that provide the convenience and immediacy of Amazon.

Apple would presumably also treat me as the customer, but I don't like the design of their devices or software and there are good alternatives. As a non-customer, Apple's existence doesn't offend me, but I do find them tedious and the amount of media attention they capture can be exhausting.

Facebook and Google don't have business models that permit them to consistently treat me as the customer, so I do what I can to avoid their services. What services they do provide (for "free") are of low value to me. I can interact with friends on a wide array of communication media. I can search the Internet via other engines. I can send and receive email from my personal mail server.

Assuming their futures mimic their present—which is probably a bad assumption—of these four, the disappearance of Facebook, Google, and Apple would be of little or no consequence to my life.

Disagree with the author’s point of view on Netflix. I think it is quite a fragile business, with no monopoly whatsoever. I’m not much of a movie/series consumer though so might be biased about it.

I find it interesting that many similar analyses very often omit Microsoft. Yet it also has astonishing breadth of offering along with very deep vertical integration that is a characteristic of modern monopolies 2.0.

Apple has enough cash on hand that they'll be able to make 0 profit for the next 50 years and still be around.

Why isn't Microsoft mentioned in the same sentence as these four? Have people already written them off?

Calling it "Apple Pods" gave me enough information to judge the trustworthiness of that guy.

Rats. I was hoping they would all go away within 5 years. Thought maybe the extra 0 was a typo. Disappointed. How can serious people still be on Facebook more than five years from now? This is demoralizing enough for me to subscribe to USA Today, the paper version, because it's an improvement. Pie charts and all.

Marketwatch is a SEO optimized site, the text is a pain to read with all the distractions to generate more page views.

Back to the topic, I do hope the large companies will be split up by regulation sooner than later.

Not if we keep letting them acquire every potential competitor.

Facebook is just social networking web site. People can get bored and use some other web site.

Amazon is only a shopping web site and a hosting company. There are popular companis like Amazon, such as AliBaba and DigitalOcean. There is nothing special about Amazon.

Google is a search engine, smart phone OS, mail, maps, video service, web browser. Looks like Google has way more chanse than Facebook and Amazon.

They each function as public institutions in their respective spaces and each is backed with substantial real world fibre and data centers.

I was thinking about how cumbersome it would be to change phone platforms if I got tired of iPhone or Android, and then how much effort I wouldn't want to spend if my Amazon device controlled all the lights, TV, audio, and temperature in my house.

The reason there never will be a "fifth" horseman is because these four giant fishes keep devouring the little ones (startup acquisition/acqui-hire). Just because things happened in past a certain way, that does not necessarily mean those events can always be used as a predictability model for future. Stock market is at all time time. Are we headed towards crash? Maybe not. Maybe this is the time where we are setting new standards. Yes, all these four have slowed down their momentum of innovation. But that innovation also goes hand-in-hand with general intelligence and thirst for innovation from the general public. I hope to see one them entering into consumer health monitoring and diagnostics, beyond heart BPM or steps counting. I will give them another decade before I give up on them. I hope the author made some good bucks towards the end. He raised a good debate.

I would feel nervous about applying old company rules to these companies. Nothing will be around forever, but if any companies ever (so far) might last, I would pick these ones.

I think everything can be summarized in these two lines from the article.

Do you think that will be in the next few decades or too hard to predict? Galloway: Too hard to predict.