Tech and Monopoly is synonymous

What is it about tech and monopoly? If tech makes everything in your life easy then for a tech giant it makes a monopoly easy too. The amount of monopolies that tech has had is quite high. While the US has strong anti-trust laws, they haven’t been able to do much to Silicon Valley.

Desktop OS: Windows and Desktop Operating System are almost synonymous. There was the duality of Windows and Mac, but in terms of market share, it was only about the former. Depending on which decade you look or which large market, the percentage of Windows domination was always in the 80s or 90s. That didn’t change much when initially the laptop came. And it wasn’t just about the OS, even MS Word, MS PPT, MS Excel all dominated. Remember Lotus 1-2-3? One doubts if anyone remembers it today. It was Microsoft all the way. Add the Intel chip and it was the era of Wintel (Windows + Intel). In the 1990s there was an antitrust case against Microsoft, but nothing came of it. One headline even billed it as the battle of the Bills. But Bill Clinton retired as US President at the end of the millennium and Gates is still relevant in the 2020s.

Search: Here again there only seems to be one player. Yahoo Search flattered to deceive! Bing tried but despite its muscle and money power couldn’t do much. Many players like Ask Jeeves and DuckDuckGo couldn’t dent Google. The Web is at the mercy of the Google algorithms and spiders. It was Facebook which came out with private content that wasn’t publicly available thanks to its exclusive 2.5 billion users.

Web browser: Here one monopoly gave way to the other. Netscape came in 1994 and cornered the market. Then it couldn’t stand the heat of Internet Explorer which became a monopoly from the end of the 1990s to the middle of the 2000s. Now it’s all about Chrome and Explorer has bitten the dust.

Video watching: While sites like Vimeo made a niche with high quality videos and TikTok ruled the young mobile short video mind space, if you look at the video watching, it is largely about YouTube which has been a colossus. In 2017, it was estimated that one billion hours of content was watched a day and since then it has only grown.

MP3 player: Here it has been all about Apple. iPod, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle and the iPod Touch. They all dominated the market and among hard drive players it had 90+% of the market. Combine all the iPods and all the other MP3 players in existence and still Apple would have a 70+ per cent share of the market. While there were many illegal downloading sites and streaming ones, initially iTunes dominated.

Mobile OS: While Windows dominated the desktop and laptop era one would have thought it would be a big player in the mobile era. But it was nowhere. That would make you think it would be a level playing field. But not really and here it is Android which dominates the market. In fact if you look at smartphones in India, then it has a nearly 99% market share!

Same story everywhere: In the mobile messaging area, WhatsApp dominates. In using GPS to get one’s way around, it’s Google Maps. While there are many regional players in ride sharing, at the global level, Uber dominates. When you look at the Web’s own dynamic encyclopaedia, Wikipedia takes the mind share. Political social media is dominated by Twitter and in visual social media its Instagram.

Combination monopolies: It’s not just in individual fields. There are many monopolies in combination. Facebook is the only social media player with 2.5 billion plus users. Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are in the One Billion Club. All 4 are in the top 5. All four are in the Mark Zuckerberg domain. Facebook is betting big on things it has like Oculus VR.

The number one Alexa ranked site is Google Search. The number two site is YouTube. Both belong to the same company Alphabet, which also has the monopolies of Android, Chrome, Google Maps etc. It will dominate the future being the king of data and getting into things like quantum computing.

Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world and also a big global cloud player, getting into things like OTT, their Alexa devices and owns its own logistics with planes and an eye to drones and driverless cars.

Finally, China has its own monopolies. So American and Chinese companies dominate and they have left the rest of the world behind. The future looks even more monopolistic with digitization spreading far and wide and an acceleration occurring due to the Covid crisis. It remains to be seen whether Big Government can break Big Tech as monopolies are being looked at all over the world.