[jpalomaki]

Especially Google and Facebook area extremely well positioned to know what is happening. They have a market research machinery never seen in history. If there's a new trendy thing catching up, they can see it coming and they know exactly who is interested. As long as governments don't intervene, they are in quite strong position to just acquire threats (or develop something similar).

Apple has piles of cash, but I think their business is kind of fragile. The valuation is based on being able to create products which sell for very high premium. I don't see them going away, but they might dropped from their top position.

For the Facebook and Google I believe the major risk is some backslash from legislation/privacy. Something like this would not wipe them out, but it might seriously damage the business. For example with Google there could be pressure to separate the search and advertising or to allow other companies to also offer ads on the search platform.

[scarface74]

Google hasn't in it's entire history shown an ability to make money on anything besides advertising. What happens when everyone has ad blockers, they do most of their searches through mobile and Facebook eats up more advertising revenue because they can do better targeting than Google since they know more about their users?

Facebook -- Facebook is already seen as a place for old people. Once your grandmother is on FB, teens don't want to use it. A whole generation of people are growing up using everything but FB.

Apple -I don't see it dying but I do see it shrinking.

Amazon- because of network affects, the cost of building warehouses, etc. It's will be hard for someone to kill Amazon.

[akeck]

I asked a tween relative whether they or anyone they know uses FB. They answered, "No one." They said they all use Instagram, though. So the current tween generation is still on an FB platform, just not FB itself.

[rockostrich]

I don't see Facebook going away. It's such a good tool for organizing groups of friends and getting back in touch with someone you haven't seen in awhile. Tweens aren't using it because they don't need those features, they just want to share things. Once they start to grow up and move away from their hometowns, I think they would start using Facebook unless another platform exists in the same space (which as far as I know doesn't).

[xbmcuser]

One of the reasons I feel the governments should look into Facebook acquiring future competitors that it feels will be competitors. In the last few years it has either acquired or copied growing social apps that it see will be a future threat.

[godzillabrennus]

The legislative backlash will begin under this administration.

You can already find right wing sites advocating for it.

[ocdtrekkie]

And while the US has been slow to act, other countries are already massively stepping up antitrust and privacy enforcement. While most of these big tech cos are based here in the US, international regulation has a massive effect on the bottom line.

[simonh]

>Apple has piles of cash, but I think their business is kind of fragile. The valuation is based on being able to create products which sell for very high premium. I don't see them going away, but they might dropped from their top position.

I’m a fan of Galloway, his YouTube stuff for L2 is great, but Amazon is beating Apple because of the Echo? Apple is now the number one watch company by revenue in the world.

Apple have been selling premium computers for 39 years. The Desktop OS market is impossible to break into. The Mac and DOS/Windows ecosystems have owned it since the 80s. Chrome is making headway, but only in a small niche.