[Nasrudith]

FAANG is a curious one to bring up as a monopoly and yet it keeps on being repeated. They are large and influential certainly but they all have one thing in common - they are all accessible to anyone with an internet connection. They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less. It may be unhealthily difficult to break into but a monopoly it is not.

Compare to the carrier and media conglomerate monopolies which don't receive any rhetorical pushes against them as monopolies. Despite them literally being the only option in many localities - and not even tiny ones either.

[rayiner]

There is almost no real competition among the FAANG companies. Google and Amazon have token hardware efforts. Only Facebook has more than a token social media effort. Apple has been careful to circumscribe its retail presence to its own hardware.

The network effects Facebook and Google enjoy are every bit as powerful as carrier barriers to entry. I have way more options for Internet access (two wired, four different cellular providers), than I do connecting with my family over social media. (My family lives all over the world, and I don’t even have phone numbers or email addresses for most of them). I have no choice not to have Google scan my emails, because my family all had gmail addresses. Etc.

[paulpauper]

Same for Microsoft. 40 years later and still no viable competition. as big of a lead now as ever.

[adventured]

> They are all desperately trying to eat each other's market-share more or less

Less.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (should be part of FAANG), Google are not trying to eat Facebook's extraordinarily profitable social monopoly. Google tried, kinda sorta, briefly. Apple raised a pinky for a second, with Ping. They can't and they know they can't, they've all given up on trying. Facebook gets to print $20+ billion per year in monopoly profit from here on out unopposed. Separately, the epic position of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger is almost entirely unopposed by Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google.

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, are not trying to eat the Windows-Office monopoly. Google is, kinda sorta. They're certainly not going out of their way to do it, say, by cutting into their $100+ billion in cash to massively subsidize the effort. Most of Google's focus is on mobile. Apple is by far the most successful company on the planet, they're not desperately trying to go after mass market share with the Mac to challenge Windows for the bottom 90% of the market. Apple is fat & happy with where their margins are at in computing, they gave up trying to dethrone the Windows monopoly a very long time ago.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook are not trying to eat Google's long duration, extraordinarily profitable search monopoly. Google search is tracking toward $40 billion per year in operating profit, the second greatest product for printing cash on earth next to the iPhone. Amazon throw a shot at it, briefly, and quickly gave up. Apple and Facebook, to whatever extent they ever considered going after mainstream search, haven't done anything there. Only Microsoft took a serious long-term shot at Google search; they're not making a serious effort there any longer, they're maintaining. Microsoft hasn't been desperately trying to take away Google's search monopoly in many years. Not only did they realize they can't, no matter what they spend, they probably like having the monopoly issue to hit Google over. The other companies are also not trying to build their own competitor to Android or YouTube (Facebook has taken a modest shot at YouTube, it isn't scratching them so far), almost entirely leaving both positions unchallenged (Apple has no interest in actually competing with Android in what it does in the market, Android is a required part of what makes the iPhone possible and lucrative, as previously with Windows & Mac; Android phones being the majority are the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, aren't interested in entering retail to compete with Amazon, essentially at all. They have no interest in those margins. They bat at Amazon's online retail empire at the edges. They're also not desperately trying to distrupt Amazon's publishing empire, ebook monopoly (arguably the least concerning of all the monopoly positions in the group, because digital book sales are declining and independent book stores are thriving).

Netflix is part of FAANG, and they're the least powerful of all of the major tech companies. They have no monopoly. Their margin is so bad it's realistically very negative - they're vaporizing incredible sums of cash, borrowing heavily (perhaps dangerously), to try to get to scale before the clock runs out. Their balance sheet gets more dire by the quarter.

[sangnoir]

>Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (should be part of FAANG), Google are not trying to eat Facebook's extraordinarily profitable social monopoly. Google tried, kinda sorta, briefly.

Google offered to buy WhatsApp for $10bn before Fb, and they went all-in with Google+ (in the worst way, but that was a serious effort).

> Apple, Amazon, Facebook, are not trying to eat the Windows-Office monopoly.

With iPads and Chromebooks, Apple and Google have made major inroads against Windows/Office - at least in the educational market. EC2 (and market changes) has a complex relationship with Windows server, but my guess is that it results in a net loss for MS licensing due to lowered barriers to competing non-MS products.

> Amazon, Apple, Facebook are not trying to eat Google's long duration, extraordinarily profitable search monopoly

Amazon is doing very well with product search - people looking for something to buy may skip searching Google altogether. Also, Alexa (and Siri) are overt, and ongoing attempts to eat Google's search lunch. Microsoft sunk a lot of money on Bing for years, and it has paid off. Fb ads are in direct competition with Adwords for marketing dollars. There's also Apple Maps, which is not a token effort.

> Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, aren't interested in entering retail to compete with Amazon, essentially at all.

Facebook has marketplace - it's not retail, but it is competition with Amazon. MS is partnering with Walmart (guess the common competitor?). Apple went to great (and illegal) lengths to target Amazon's publishing empire when they were ring-leaders in colluding with traditional publishers against Amazon.

There is a lot of vigorous competition between the big companies. Unfortunately, the playing ground is so uneven that only big companies can dare step on another big co.'s turf

[Nasrudith]

That is a list of where they are different but there are still areas of competition. Just because it isn't a one hundred percent overlap doesn't mean it isn't competition - otherwise one would say that GE isn't really competing with Samsung because GE doesn't make cellphones - ignoring the overlap of the appliance market.

Competing with large and broad corporations is a 'how do you eat an elephant' thing and they are increasingly prodding at each other for weaknesses. Trying to compete everywhere at once in prime specialties would generally be a losing prospect from the start even if they were willing to spend vast amounts of capital by mega corporation standards - not start up ones. You could compete with Apple on cellphones but trying the high end 'fashion' segment of the market would likely be a losing prospect as that is their prime specialty where they are established. Now if it is say Blackberry who has proven inept at their prime specialty they may wind up seized even by companies who aren't even trying for their niche.

Voice assistants aren't even limited to just Apple and Amazon, Google, Microsoft and even Samsung are trying to get on it. Apple is trying Apple media again and Apple, Amazon, and Google all have their own music stores for one. They may not be as prevalent relatively speaking but they aren't just letting each other keep their specialties.

I suppose part of this also has to do with definition of monopoly and it being versatile. Technically speaking owning a grain field, mill, and a bakery is a monopoly - a vertical one. You have to be able to compete with their own grain production costs and milling costs in order for it to sell wheat or flour to their bakery - otherwise they would just use their own as cheaper.

What are referred to as tech monopolies trivially have comparable alternatives but people don't go with them. You can host your own email or have anyone hosting video data - they just won't be the behemoth in the room. I suspect there may be some talking past each other.