Week in Review - Big Tech won't stay big forever

Saturday, November 14, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hello, hello, and welcome back to Week in Review. Last week I talked game consoles; this week I’m theorizing how long our current spread of tech companies can hold their dominance.

By the time you read this, I will have embarked on a vacation to the Grand Canyon in all its splendor. I won’t be writing Week in Review next week and will be passing the duties to the more than capable hands of my colleague Natasha. I’ll miss you dearly and will continue our correspondence after Thanksgiving.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The Big Story

I’ve read dozens of stories this year about the U.S. federal government potentially taking aggressive antitrust action against big consumer tech companies, but to be honest, the idea of them going beyond a big one-time fine has always seemed to be a liberal pipe dream. What I’ve increasingly wondered is how long some of these massive consumer tech companies will even last without antitrust action, perhaps assuming that the government at least made it harder for them to acquire competitors.

More often that not the company that makes me think of this scenario is Google. The company is hilariously inefficient at times and seems to lose focus on its priorities every few months. In a lot of ways it really represents an org that’s aging out and turning into what feels like a pretty stodgy legacy company. Now, to be clear, it’s not quite there yet, and it’s also not there yet from a financial perspective, but I would argue that it’s pretty clear that the company has lost a lot of its internal structure to innovate.

Want an example? Look at any consumer rollout the company has made in the past five years. There are sure to be some bright spots of modest break-even efforts, but most are flashy launches that eventually lose the company’s support and flail quickly.

Even without that innovation, Google has a lot to keep it going. Nobody is going to take the company down in the world of search; they have too much data and too much of a head start, and I think it truly will take a major shift in the way people discover online information in order to chip away at this. Apple seems to be doing something interesting by building deeper web search into iOS itself, but maybe something like augmented reality will change how consumers approach and think of search.

This week Google announced some changes to Photos that are basically aiming to push consumers to start paying for Google services that have long been free. I think the company is going to try to approach this carefully at first, but I have a tough time imagining them pulling this off, and I can foresee them replicating this failure across a good chunk of their services.

Focusing on the consumer side of tech, Facebook is also in an interesting position. Their core app has never had more users worldwide, and yet it’s clear the app itself is in a state of decline product-wise; it’s become too much for too many people, and if you take a step back, it’s clear that a big use case of the app is just circulating some fairly low-quality web trash through its progressively aging user base. Instagram has been getting more complex over the last couple of years and it’s clear that its continued popularity isn’t guaranteed, especially as signs indicate that TikTok’s stateside rise will only continue and Snap is even more well-positioned to be a formidable giant going forward.

I think the real thing is that I can’t remember the last time I asked a startup with a consumer tint what they would do if Google or Facebook decided they wanted to be in the same business they were in. Google is too big to maneuver quickly and while Facebook still has some of that maneuverability, they have too much baggage from their massive user base to roll things out in a meaningfully aggressive way to truly take advantage of their network effects.

All of this is to say that these businesses have plenty to keep them going, but just because tech companies are reaching new milestones in terms of size doesn’t mean they are any less vulnerable. This isn’t an argument against regulation so much as it is pointing out that consumer tech is hard to maintain an edge in, and while all these companies may prove to build substantial utility businesses that won’t easily disappear, it’s hard to stay on top forever.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

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