I think the sentiment is true, though, that the giant tech companies are a diverse set of businesses. There’s overlap between them, but they focus on different things and are successful in (mostly) each their own market.
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.