The Upside of Being Ruled by Five Tech Giants
http://www.todayonline.com/technology-0/upside-being-ruled-five-tech-giants
This article critiques on the “Big Five” technology companies that have very strong market power in different aspects. While the companies Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft continue to expand their markets, the author notes that they have access to people’s information and data similar to that of government because of their coverage(which makes the public feel insecure about their private information). While the population that the Big Five have information on is significant, the author expresses positivity and notes that the five companies can still be controlled(and is still beneficial). Using the Russian Scandal as an example, the article notes that the basis for the news to spread is the large coverage of the Big Five. However, it was also because of the large coverage was the Russian scandal able to be clarified through clarifying that it is a scandal to the large share of the market that the Big Five can reach. The article also notes how the Big Five compete against one another, trying to expand their own functions and gain more market share from the population. At last, the article talks about the stability that each company(of the big five) has achieved due to the Network effects.
As we have discussed in class about the networks effects, the market is hard to enter/change after a majority has settled on a product that employs the network effect. Therefore, even though that the five companies continue to introduce products and services with novelties, no one can clearly wipe out the other company through gaining more market share. This also leads to an interesting point that Professor Easley talks about in that once a company that uses the network effects has gained a certain share of the market, it is hard for a new company to enter the competition, even if the new company has a better idea/service/product. It can also be assumed that later introduced products did not get to the tipping point in order to gain the majority of the market share, therefore leading to almost no buyers at the end for the similar product introduced to the market. The spread of information on the social media also relates to how the information spread online through the nodes and links we have discussed in class. While it is easy to have wrong and biased information spread online through different paths(such as having wrong calculated Pagerank and nomination or sharing information via social media), it also easy for authorities to reach out to the public and inform about the fraudulent rumours. Finally, the article mentioned the record of data for users from the different companies, which enables them to grow in “power” in the sense of understanding their consumers better. This is similar to what we covered in class when discussing the cost per click, where the search engine monitors the clicking behavior and generate information about the users, eventually reckoning the products and advertisements that the user would like to see.