Oh dear, what drivel. By that logic, BP is not an oil and gas company, it's logistics company helping people and goods get to where they're needed the most. And Deutsche Bank isn't a bank, it's a charity focused on making people's and companies' dreams come true (for a small fee).
Please spare me this bullshit.
But I think this analysis overlooks the ways where these tech companies do sort of compete: search advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook; search has some (very weak) competition from Microsoft and Amazon; cloud services are competitive between Google and Amazon... I think the stronger pattern is Alphabet is in everything and in some way competing with every other giant.
IBM Cloud revenue is a head-scratcher. I've had to use them in the past, and while they have some unique features, it's hard to imagine anyone choosing them unless they had an explicit need for those features, or were forced into using IBM due to existing business relationships. I guess corporate inertia (possibly from the SoftLayer days) is a hard thing to overcome.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/11/microsoft-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/05/21/top-cloud-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-...
At my company, we use GCP almost exclusively with preembtible TPUs as our primary compute for training models. It's not cheap, but you can't beat the performance and quality. Plus when you compare it with how much the engineers here are getting paid, it's a drop in the bucket ultimately.
I have worked in a number of industries and rarely needed any ML (though it may be coming). Most folks need clean data and linear regressions in my experience.
The problem with this article, the drivel, is projecting nonsensical narratives onto these entities.
So while Google is certainly not a customer facing data services company, I still have no idea how they see themselves. Which would be useful information.
A better (actionable) external narrative is Scott Galloway's The Four. I have no idea if Galloway's analysis is closer to the mark. But at least it's self-consistent. [http://www.thefourbook.com]
One thing that should be worth looking at given where we are in the economic cycle is how procyclical these businesses are. They didn't suffer much in the 2008 crisis as they were in full expension mode, but now these businesses are starting to be mature. Ads and retail are certainly very procyclical. $1000 smartphone too I presume. Cloud should be more stable, depending on how much of their income is VC funded loss making startups. Business license should be fairly stable.