ilbert Wong, the mayor of
Cupertino, California, calls his
city council to order. “As you
know, Cupertino is very famous
for Apple Computer, and we’re
very honored to have Mr. Steve
Jobs come here tonight to give
a special presentation,” the
mayor says. “Mr. Jobs?” And
there he is, in his black turtleneck and jeans, shuffling to the
podium to the kind of uproarious applause absent from most
city council meetings. It is a
shock to see him here on ground level, a thin man amid other citizens,
rather than on stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center with a larger-than-life projection screen behind him. He seems out of place, like a lion
ambling through the mall.
“Apple is growing like a weed,” Jobs begins, his voice quiet and sometimes shaky. But there’s nothing timorous about his plan: Apple, he says,
would like to build a gargantuan new campus on a 150-acre parcel of land
that it acquired from Hewlett-Packard in 2010. The company has commissioned architects—“some of the best in the world”—to design something extraordinary, a single building that will house 12,000 Apple employees. “It’s a pretty amazing building,” Jobs says, as he unveils images
of the futuristic edifice on the screen. The stunning glass-and-concrete
circle looks “a little like a spaceship landed,” he opines.
Nobody knew it at the time, but the Cupertino City Council meeting
on June 7, 2011, was Jobs’s last public appearance before his resignation
as Apple’s CEO in late August. It’s a fitting way to go out. When completed
in 2015, Apple’s new campus will have a footprint slightly smaller than
that of the Pentagon; its diameter will exceed the height of the Empire
State Building. It will include its own natural-gas power plant and will
use the grid only for backup power. This isn’t just a new corporate campus but a statement: Apple—which now jockeys daily with ExxonMobil
for the title of the world’s most valuable company—plans to become a
galactic force for the eons.
And as every sci-fi nerd knows, you totally need a tricked-out battleship if you’re about to engage in serious battle.
To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that
have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile
phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This
g
“Our development is guided by
the idea that every year, the
amount that people want to add,
share, and express is increasing,”
says Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg. “We can look into
the future—and it’s going to be
really, really good.”
competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive
excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest
of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple
head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of
Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it
cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft’s every move must be viewed
as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the
case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the
block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers,
and why not? They have the best weapons—weapons that will now be
turned on one another as they seek more room to grow.
There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company
quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How
quaint that assessment seems today.
Jeff Bezos, who was ahead of the curve in creating a cloud data service,
is pushing Amazon into digital media, book publishing, and, with his
highly buzzed-about new line of Kindle tablets, including the $199 Fire,
a direct assault on the iPad. Amazon almost doubled in size from 2008 to
2010, when it hit $34 billion in annual revenue; analysts expect it to reach
$100 billion in annual revenue by 2015, faster than any company ever.
Remember when Google’s goal was to catalog all the world’s information? Guess that task was too tiny. In just a few months at the helm, CEO
Larry Page has launched a social network (Google+) to challenge Facebook,
and acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in part to compete more
ferociously against Apple. Google’s You Tube video service is courting
producers to make original programming. Page can afford these big
swings (and others) in the years ahead, given the way his advertising
business just keeps growing. It’s on pace to bring in more than $30 billion
this year, almost double 2007’s revenue.
Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world’s biggest social
network; it is the world’s most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share—personal info, pictures
(more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies. With
access to the “Likes” of more than 800 million people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an unequaled trove of data on individual consumer behavior that
he can use to personalize both media and advertising.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders;
they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting
the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world
and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not
go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting
stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.
Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab
Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere’s panting coverage of their
every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world’s most valuable
company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors
about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further
into one another’s space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler
products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a
competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four
have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why
you need a program guide to the battle ahead.
