GAFA — Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. Source: University of Pennsylvania.

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?

Rodrigo Salvaterra
7 min readFeb 11, 2020

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.

Exhibit 1 — The Big Four perceived core competencies and how each other competitor is threatening their leadership by offering similar services even in a much lower scale. The more overlaps, more vulnerable and greater competitiveness. Source: Author, Deighton.

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…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Published in Towards Data Science

Your home for data science and AI. The world’s leading publication for data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence professionals.

Written by Rodrigo Salvaterra

AI | Economist | Speaker | PM | Tech | Harvard Econ & Management M.A.

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Liked the Venn diagram concept. Wondering what you think might those opportunities look like? Also, where would you put Gaming here (digital content)? Looks like it is getting big now a days (Stadia, Occlus...).

--