Who is Winning: Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple?
GAFA’s competencies are more similar than you might think. But who is ahead of the game?
Have you heard the term GAFA? It refers to the four tech giants Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, companies that transformed the media industry, the internet, business models, and society. They capture an ever-growing portion of consumer’s spending by shifting consumers away from traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and even displacing them.
On one hand, Google and Facebook led the digital and display market while Amazon and Apple dominated online retailing. Despite their seeming differences, all four have similar capabilities such as search, social, retail, and advertising.
In a Venn diagram of service offering (see Exhibit 1), one can see that although they started with very different core competencies, they developed related diversification which now overlaps with one another. What all have in common is ads. This competition helped to shape the convenience of e-commerce for consumers but created several negative externalities such as market concentration, reduced competition…