The Purpose of Big Tech

Source: Logos

There are many Big Tech companies, and they are either added or dropped from the list very fast.
From the initial FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), to the FAANG (the 4 + Apple), or GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft).
But for our case, we are just going to talk about the Big Four: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

I was watching a video from Scott Galloway - a business professor from New York University, talking about the problem with Big Tech and he gave a point of view which I thought was pretty interest.
If you are interested in the talk, here's the video (it's about 20 minutes long).

But the interesting point he made that stood out to me was the sheer size of human capital these Big Techs hires and what they do with their human capital.

The Manhattan Project, the creation of the nuclear bomb, which ended WWII and brought world peace ✌ had almost 130,000 people working on the project.

By a similar number, Facebook and Google hire a total of 134,000 people, and what they did was to try and predict and show you another ad so that you would click. Don't hear it from me, the Prof from the video said so, so did Li Hong Yi (PM Lee's son)

Of course, this is an interesting perspective but definitely not all true.

Without Google, you won't be reading this article (powered by Blogger, which is owned by Google), you won't be able to watch the video I added above, either would you be able to navigate in a foreign country (or even your own country without Google Maps).

And we definitely need Facebook to know what new branded bag our friends bought, who broke up with their partner and started ranting on social media etc.

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400,000 people came together to land Neil Armstrong and his team on the moon, which by any account is quite a remarkable feat for us.

Think about this: your iPhone has 100,000 times more computing capacity than the computer that landed the men on the Moon, and all we are doing with it is play Call of Duty (not that it's a bad use, it's a pretty good game 😁). 

Amazon and Apple hire almost double the number of people in the Apollo Project, their main goal is to sell you another iPhone (you can buy it on Apple stores or Amazon website). 

Sure, Apple is focused on creating the best product and Amazon is focused on creating the best customer experience. 

 No one thought they needed to use their face to unlock their phones until Apple did it and suddenly everyone's like 'OMG! This should have always been the way to unlock a phone.' 

 And if we don't have Amazon, there won't be Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider that powers between the bulk of the internet. Netflix and Slack are just 2 examples of companies running on AWS, in addition to many other governments and companies.

Conclusion

There are always 2 sides to everything. Technology is a 2-edged sword: you can benefit from it, or get hurt from it.

We connect with our friends and families via social media, but many are also cyber-bullied via these platforms.

We get information and knowledge via search, but many newspapers are losing revenue because of falling ad revenues.

We get products delivered to our doorstep fast, but many small businesses (and big retailers) are going bankrupt.

We get the best quality devices and services, but many other companies that are offering similar services get crushed via competition from the platform owners. 

Do I have a solution? Nope, I don't.

I still want to watch YouTube videos for free (so I'll watch the ads, even though now you can get YouTube Premium to not watch ads in your videos).

But I'll use 'Sign In with Apple', to limit the data that companies are collecting on me when I use their services.

It is about making choices, and it always helps if we have clearer and better information about what are we getting, and what are the trade-offs.

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