The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Google has accomplished the opposite: it has made itself into a public utility.

It is ubiquitous, increasingly invisible i...

Its market dominance is so great that it’s in perpetual risk of antitrust suits at home and abroad.

The EU seems to have a particular animus toward the company, filing four formal charges since 2015. The European Commission has accused Google of unfair advantage over ad competitors.26 With a 90 percent share of EU search, and headquarters not in the EU, Google is a—rightfully—attractive target for people who are charged with policing the market.

despite its enormous market dominance—the greatest of any of the Four—Google is also uniquely vulnerable.

the crucial step was the hiring as CEO of Eric Schmidt, a scientist turned businessman who had paid his dues at Sun Microsystems and Novell.

Both of those firms had taken on Microsoft—and lost.

Schmidt swore that would never h...

Schmidt turned his obsession into a strategy

Google may have had just one product (that made money), but it was world changing, and the company did everything right.

The goofy name and simple homepage, the honest search, uninfluenced by advertisers, the apparent lack of interest in moving into other markets, and the likable founders all conspired to make Google appealing to everyday users and apparently unthreatening to potential competitors (such as the New York Times) until it was too late.

But behind the curtain, Google was undertaking one of the most ambitious strategies in business history: to organize all of the world’s information.

In particular, to capture and control every cache of productive information that currently existed on, or could be ported to, the web.

And with absolute single-mindedness, the company ha...

With the insidious nature of search, Google’s absorption of all the world’s information took place in the open—and potential victims didn’t seem to notice until it was too late.

As a result, Google’s control of knowledge is now so complete, and the barriers to entry by competitors so great (look at the marginal success of Microsoft’s Bing), that the firm might maintain control for years.

notice that it too is basically a one-trick (and one trick only) pony.

There is search (YouTube is a search engine) and there is . . . well, Android—but that’s an industry smartphone standard, devised by Schmidt to counter the iPhone, and its biggest players are other companies.

The result was that Microsoft suffered a massive loss of intellectual capital as old talent left and young talent no longer wanted to work there.

Suddenly, even when Microsoft had a good product idea, it no longer seemed to be able to execute on it.

Google isn’t Microsoft—yet. The search firm still boasts the greatest assembly of IQ in history.

STEALING IS A CORE COMPETENCE of high-growth tech firms.

Tech giants, of course, don’t start out as globally dominant megalodons. They begin as ideas, as someone’s garage or dorm-room project.

Their path looks obvious and even inevitable in hindsight, but it’s almost always an improvisational series of actions and reactions.

As with professional athletes, we tend to focus on the stories of the few who make it—and not the thousands who n...

But change is inevitable, in part because the marketplace is always changing, so companies must adapt or die,

but also because young companies with nothing to lose can (and do) get away with the deception, thievery, and outright falsehoods that are unavailable to companies with reputations, markets, and assets to protect.

The sins of the horsemen fall into one of two types of cons. The first is taking—which often means stealing IP from other companies and repurposing it for profit, only to viciously protect that IP once they’ve amassed a lot of it. The second is profiting from assets built by someone else in a manner unavailable to the originator.

The first means that the future horsemen don’t have to depend upon their native ingenuity to come up with innovative ideas—and throwing lawyers at those who try the same thing to them means they won’t be victims, too. The second is a reminder that the so-called first-mover advantage is usually not an advantage.

Industry pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs—while the ho...

get to feed off the carcasses of their predecessors by learning from their mistakes, buying their assets, and taking their customers.

Great companies often rely on some sort of lie or IP theft to accrue value at a speed and scale previously unimaginable, and the Four are no different.

Leveraging other people’s ideas to inspire new inventions and stronger iterations is at the foundation of many successful firms.

Apple wasn’t the first to create a smartphone. Google wasn’t the first to build a search engine.

They just figured out a way to do it bette...

Perhaps the most obvious “theft” in recent tech is Facebook’s continuous adoption...

The point is not that young companies just “steal” things to become great,

but they see value where others don’t, or are able to extract value where others can’t.

Another way the Four cheat is by borrowing your information, only to sell it back to you.

that information could be given away free with one hand, while made very, very profitable with the other.

newspapers and magazines had a natural obligation to let information be crawlable, sliceable, query-able, and searchable . . . by Google.

Google’s “valuable free service” was, in fact, rapidly gutting the advertising base of the American media—and rerouting all those revenues to Google.

Meanwhile, Google hoovered up information—about us, about our habits, about our world—turning its algorithms loose on that information to bring us more “valuable free services.”

requiring a specific request to opt out if you don’t want them to cross-reference your movements and activity against location and searches.

There is no evidence of any intent beyond the data being used for better targeting.

Creepy and relevance are strongly correlated in the world of...

To date, consumers and advertisers have voted with their actions and expressed that creepy is a price w...

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

So, you have these two fighting against each other.

Michael Bloomberg never fell for it—giving information away. He mixed other people’s information with proprietary data, added a layer of intelligence and—here’s