The exascale technology corporation of the 21st century is a completely different beast than the mega-corporations of the 20th century in one absolutely key way: They are disrupting themselves to successfully stay relevant in a fast moving market.
Back before Google became Alphabet, they made a huge decision to realign themselves around Machine Learning as the core of how they do business in all aspects [1].
It could do that because 1. Their services could benefit from the improvement directly and 2. it didn't need to build a new machine factory, or assembly line like GE would have had to, if it wanted to completely realign themselves to eg. solar production or a 21st century technology.
It sounds trivial and obvious but Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are all information management companies. They are all trying to become the central nervous system for consumer behavior in all aspects. That means collecting ungodly amounts of data, having a dense psychometric profile of users and then feeding users what they want to feed them. The better data they have the more locked in people become and there are fewer sources of data available for other people.
So they most important thing is to get users to become part of their ecosystem - that means having some kind of insight into every digital system that a user interacts with. Unless you can create a new ecosystem that people interact with at such scale (Snap is probably the closest) then you can't compete with them. Also notice that Snap is still relying on Google Cloud [2] so Google wins either way.
The fact that the top 5 have so much money, talent etc... also means that any company that isn't a leap beyond in user interaction, can be easily wooed through a lucrative acquisition and access to user data at massive scale.
It's only going to get more consolidated because the average person only cares about usability and interoperability - so even if you aren't locked into just Apple, or Google, they all touch each other in some way that you are going to be part of the big 5 ecosystem no matter what.
Back before Google became Alphabet, they made a huge decision to realign themselves around Machine Learning as the core of how they do business in all aspects [1].
It could do that because 1. Their services could benefit from the improvement directly and 2. it didn't need to build a new machine factory, or assembly line like GE would have had to, if it wanted to completely realign themselves to eg. solar production or a 21st century technology.
It sounds trivial and obvious but Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are all information management companies. They are all trying to become the central nervous system for consumer behavior in all aspects. That means collecting ungodly amounts of data, having a dense psychometric profile of users and then feeding users what they want to feed them. The better data they have the more locked in people become and there are fewer sources of data available for other people.
So they most important thing is to get users to become part of their ecosystem - that means having some kind of insight into every digital system that a user interacts with. Unless you can create a new ecosystem that people interact with at such scale (Snap is probably the closest) then you can't compete with them. Also notice that Snap is still relying on Google Cloud [2] so Google wins either way.
The fact that the top 5 have so much money, talent etc... also means that any company that isn't a leap beyond in user interaction, can be easily wooed through a lucrative acquisition and access to user data at massive scale.
It's only going to get more consolidated because the average person only cares about usability and interoperability - so even if you aren't locked into just Apple, or Google, they all touch each other in some way that you are going to be part of the big 5 ecosystem no matter what.
[1]https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-facebook-microsoft-rema...
[2] http://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14492026/snap-ipo-2-billion-c...