Technology Is In Everything and So Are The Tech Giants

It’s no secret that technology is increasingly at the core of many products and services and as this proliferates, tech giants are getting into new businesses as well as into each other businesses.
In this world, tech matters and so does brand and scale.

Look at Facebook:
• Its new Marketplaces product, where users can buy and sell their used belongings, threatens Craiglist and Ebay
• Its new Facebook at Work feature threatens LinkedIn
• It is also launching a food ordering option from any Facebook business page (watch out GrubHub and Seamless)

And this does not only apply to Facebook; Uber launched UberEats and Google launched a new cellphone called Pixel, getting into hardware production. Moreover, we all know that Google, Apple, Uber and Facebook are working on self-driving cars. Amazon is getting into the logistics service, and most of them are into the “Internet of Things” space.

More significantly, Artificial Intelligence will expand these giants (including IBM, of course) and enable them to encroach into other industries even further.

A lot of fiction writers have imagined a world where machines overtake the world and turn on their masters. I tend to be more optimistic. Google was very prescient on the power they would have by controlling the world’s data. Do you remember their first motto: “Don’t do Evil?”