Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Advantages of Bigness

By Om Malik

August 9, 2016

At some point in a big, successful company’s life, it comes up against the problem of the law of large numbers. In the simplest terms, a fast-growing company can’t keep growing at the same fast rate forever. It eventually has to slow down. For years, people have been looking for signs that Apple is finally hitting its growth limits. And this year Apple revenue fell for the first time since 2003. The same concerns face other giants in the tech economy: Google (now part of the parent company Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

And, yet, for a brief time in July, the stock markets, arbiters of future fortunes, anointed those five technology companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook—as the top five American companies by market capitalization. Market value changes all the time, but, still, for that moment, they were the Big Five.

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