Here’s a bracing look at the digital world, from Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt:
He said four big companies dominate the Internet: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Google has all the world’s information; Apple is the king of elegant design; Facebook is where your social life is; Amazon is where you buy everything. Between them the four are worth about a half a trillion dollars. Microsoft was glaringly missing from the list.
Words to conjure with.
One way to thin about this is to see what’s missing. Microsoft is one, and others have called Schmidt on underplaying Office and XBox. Another is gaming, which barely trickles across each of these.
Well, that’s mostly true in English-speaking space. But is it true of the Internet as a whole given the rapid rise of Chinese users?
I don’t know the answer, but it may well be that there are culture-specific dominate companies. I suspect there are some, in smaller countries, that those of us in the US would never know of unless we traveled there.