This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of previous columns.
Every few months I come up with new ways of saying that tech giants make a lot of money. Today I give up.
I’m just saying that Big Tech companies are very, very, very, very big and very, very, very, very, REALLY rich.
That even applies to the company we know as Facebook, which ran into a financial wall on Wednesday. This might be the end of Facebook as we know it — maybe! — but the company will likely continue to make big profits for years to come.
America’s five technology superpowers – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook – are gigantic and still growing. They have nearly infinite resources to help them stay on top. And their products are so sought after that even obscure pieces of their kingdoms are insanely popular.
Here are some numbers.
Apple’s last year profit ($101 billion) was more than the combined annual profits of — take a deep breath — Walmart, General Motors, Exxon, Pfizer, Verizon, Disney, Coke and McDonald’s.
Do you know what YouTube Shorts are? New? They’re YouTube’s answer to TikTok’s bite-sized videos, and Google said this week people watch 15 billion every day. This song was so crazy that I kept asking people if I had misunderstood.
Facebook… OK, Facebook is not in a good place. The number of daily users of Facebook and its Messenger app has shrunk slightly. The company warned that TikTok’s popularity was hurting and ad sales were sputtering, in part because of restrictions Apple recently placed on collecting personal data on iPhone apps.
I’m not sure I believe Facebook is in as much trouble as it suggests. Yet. Facebook executives have a habit of warning of doom, but the company just keeps going.
This time it may be different. But even Facebook’s suddenly frowning face generated an average of $214 for each user in the US and Canada last year. For a free item. Facebook is one of the best money making machines in internet history, and if it dies, it will slowly. I think.
Microsoft owns the (unpopular) Bing search engine. It sells online ads there and elsewhere, including on LinkedIn. And yet, the company’s annual advertising revenue of more than $10 billion is about 20 times DailyExpertNews’ 2021 ad revenue.
Amazon’s stock price — like many tech companies — has fallen about 18 percent so far this year. But Amazon is so gargantuan that its wiped out value ($267 billion) alone is about Disney’s total worth. Jeff Bezos’ new yacht is so large that a bridge is being demolished in the Netherlands to bring the boat to height. THAT is rich.
Outside of tech, big US companies usually do dandy too. But the tech superpowers are on a very different planet from the merely big and rich.
Big Tech’s ongoing financial insanity rubs off vital questions for this newsletter: Is Big Tech’s success good for us? And are those five superpowers big and dominant because they make good things, or do their size and power practically guarantee further dominance?
We know that people and businesses need the products of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. And those companies tend to say they could die at any moment. The history of technology backs that up. Dominant companies don’t stay that way for long.
But this handful of tech companies have become so entangled in our lives, economies, world affairs and brains that they’ve had a grip on them for years. Microsoft and Apple are each more than 45 years old. Google and Amazon started about a quarter of a century ago. Those companies have had a hard time, but they have mostly been rich and successful for much of their history. We can imagine nothing else.
Facebook is currently the youngest and most vulnerable of the bunch, but it has reinvented itself for a decade and has survived (until now) every doubt.
The fear of Big Tech – questions about illegal monopolies and how they control speech and digital economies – boils down to a debate about whether our digital lives are defined by dynamics or permanent dynasties. We will see.
Tip of the week
Choose a cloud service
Brian X. Chen, the personal tech columnist for The Times, responded to our On Tech editor, Hanna Ingber, who asked a question she thought readers would have. Hannah wrote:
“I find choosing between cloud storage options endlessly terrifying (so I basically just pay everyone). What to do?” (Hanna pays for three cloud storage services!)
google drive. dropbox. Box. iCloud. Microsoft OneDrive. These are all cloud services, these are servers for storing our data online.
They are convenient to use because you no longer have to worry about losing your data when copies of your files are in the cloud. They all cost a few dollars a month to store a significant amount of data. So how do you pick just one?
I explored this question in a previous column on the best way to manage your smartphone photos. Based on my conversations with techies, the most sensible approach is to choose a service that is “device independent.” That means a cloud service that is not exclusive to a specific brand. That ignores iCloud, which mainly works for Apple products like iPhones.
It’s important to choose a cloud storage service that gives you the freedom and flexibility to move your files elsewhere if you want to switch to another device.
That’s why I often suggest that people keep their data in Google’s cloud. Google’s cloud-based apps for word processing, photo management, spreadsheets, and file storage work on Apple and Android phones. And in general, its tools are usable through a web browser on any computer or smartphone.
I usually write in a web browser with Google Docs on my Mac. And if I wanted to edit documents on a PC, I could use the same tool in a browser in Windows.
Before we go…
A solo hacker says he took North Korea offline: A US security researcher who goes by the name P4x online told Wired that North Korean spies targeted him in a cyberattack last year. Frustrated by what he felt was a lack of visible response from US officials, P4x says he hacked into North Korea’s internet from his living room and claimed responsibility for ongoing online blackouts in the country.
The Bad Reputation Cleaners: Rest of the world surveyed companies specializing in helping wealthy businessmen and politicians scrub the internet with information they don’t like. The technical publication reports that the reputation management firms often use false copyright claims and false legal notices to attempt to publish online news articles containing allegations of tax evasion, corruption or drug trafficking by their clients.
You buy everything online. What about cremation services?
Hug for this
I asked on Twitter for videos of sloths, and the Sloth Institute parked these long-limbed charmers in my feed.
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