The Fab Four and the Post PC World: Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy.

[Kent Brooks]

This is a really great article, one of the best I have read lately so I thought I would list a few of the key points, but to think Apple can win without Chutzpah (Steve Jobs) is a bit ludicrous.Apple is big but it is simply not the same without Jobs.  It will be interesting to see if Tim Cook can guide Apple in a manner that somewhat keeps pace with the other business behemoths discussed in this article.

Having been in IT for the past 20 years it is hard to fathom that Microsoft is a second tier player, but it is true.  The thing to understand is that there is not one killer app, but there may be 4 dominant apps and our mentality of putting companies in a well defined box doesn't work well with these companies.   "There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today."   However, It will be interesting to see if Apple keeps pace. 

 

Look at these highlights from the article: 

 

Jeff Bezos, who was ahead of the curve in creating a cloud data service, is pushing Amazon into digital media, book publishing, and, with his highly buzzed-about new line of Kindle tablets, including the $199 Fire, a direct assault on the iPad. Amazon almost doubled in size from 2008 to 2010, when it hit $34 billion in annual revenue; analysts expect it to reach $100 billion in annual revenue by 2015, faster than any company ever.

 

Remember when Google's goal was to catalog all the world's information? Guess that task was too tiny. In just a few months at the helm, CEO Larry Page has launched a social network (Google+) to challenge Facebook, and acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in part to compete more ferociously against Apple. Google's YouTube video service is courting producers to make original programming.

 

Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world's biggest social network; it is the world's most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share--personal info, pictures (more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies.

 

Finally, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don't recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.

 

I find it funny the monopolistic lawsuits against Microsoft from the past.  These four are bigger and will be bigger than Microsoft ever dreamed.  This will be fun to watch I hope Apple can keep up.