The Big Four of Technology

Life will never be the same after Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

Four tech giants are changing the world for good and bad, but also inexorably. This is the premise of “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,” by Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business, and this week’s guest (for the third and likely last time) on our Masters in Business podcast.
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Many of his ideas are thought-provoking:

• Apple Inc. has morphed from a tech company into a luxury-goods maker, with all of the usual hallmarks: an iconic founder, artisanal craftsmanship and design, and vertical retail integration. Galloway describes founder Steve Jobs as “the modern Jesus Christ” and explains why this is not a good thing. “Voice,” he said, is the next great interface, and Apple has blown its five-year lead in this area.
• Facebook Inc. has made many of the best acquisitions of the 21st century; it owns three of the five online platforms that have gotten to 100 million users the fastest. However, Facebook’s response to how its newsfeed was used for political mischief is a potential boomerang.

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