What the Riches of Big Technology Mean for Our Future

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This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection past columns.

Every few months, I make it up new ways means tech giants earn a lot of money. I’m giving up today.

I’m just going to say Big Tech companies are really, really, really, really big and really, really, really, REALLY rich.

This is true even for the company we know as Facebook. financial hit a brick wall Wednesday. This could be the end of Facebook as we know it – maybe! – but the company is likely to continue generating huge profits for years to come.

America’s five tech superpowers – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook – are huge and continue to grow. They have nearly endless resources to help them stay on top. And their products are in such demand that even obscure bits of their kingdom are insanely popular.

Here are some numbers.

  • Apple’s profits last year ($101 billion) were more than the combined annual profits of Walmart, General Motors, Exxon, Pfizer, Verizon, Disney, Coke and McDonald’s.

  • Do you know what YouTube Shorts are? Number? These are YouTube’s response to TikTok’s bite-size videos, and Google said this week 15 billion people watched it. every day. This trick was so crazy that I kept asking people if I had misunderstood.

  • Facebook … OK, Facebook is not in a good place. The number of daily users of Facebook and Messenger application decreased slightly. The company warns that TikTok’s popularity is hurting it, partly because its ad sales have skyrocketed. Apple’s recent restrictions About personal data collections in iPhone apps.

    I’m not sure I believe you’re in as much trouble as Facebook thinks you are. Yet. Facebook admins has a habit of foretelling the apocalypsebut the company continues to move forward.

    This time may be different. But even the suddenly sullen Facebook earned an average of $214 per user last year in the US and Canada. For a free product. Facebook is one of the best money making machines in the history of the internet and if it dies it will happen gradually. According to me.

  • Microsoft owns the (unpopular) Bing search engine. It sells ads there and elsewhere online, including on LinkedIn. Still, the company’s annual ad sales of over $10 billion are nearly 20 times the 2021 ad sales of The New York Times.

  • Amazon’s stock price — like that of many tech companies — has dropped nearly 18 percent so far this year. But Amazon is so huge that only the wiped value ($267 billion) is about Disney’s total value. Jeff Bezos’ new yacht is so big Dutch bridge to be dismantled to accommodate the height of the boat. THIS is rich.

Outside of technology, large US companies mostly make dandy too. But the superpowers of technology completely different planet only the big and rich.

Big Tech’s ongoing financial frenzy is rubbing on fundamental questions for this newsletter: Is Big Tech’s success good for us? And are these five superpowers great and dominant because they do good?

We know that people and businesses need Products from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. And these companies tend to say they can die at any moment. The history of technology supports this. Dominant companies don’t tend to stay that way for very long.

But these handful of tech companies are so immersed in our lives, economies, world affairs, and brains that they’ve been holding on for years. Microsoft and Apple are each over 45 years old. Google and Amazon started nearly a quarter of a century ago. These companies have had tough times, but for most of their history they have been mostly wealthy and successful. We cannot imagine anything different.

Facebook is currently the youngest and most vulnerable of the bunch, but over the course of a decade it has reinvented itself and surpassed every doubt (so far).

Concern about Big Tech (illegal monopolies and questions about how they control speech and digital economies) boils down to a debate about whether our digital lives are defined by dynamism or perpetual dynasties. We’ll see.

Tip of the Week

Brian X ChenThe Times personal tech columnist responded to our On Tech editor, Hanna Ingber, by asking a question she thinks will come to mind for readers. Hanna wrote:

“I find choosing between cloud storage options extremely worrying (so I basically pay everyone). What shall we do?” (Hanna pays for three cloud storage services!)

Google driver. Dropbox. Box. iCloud. Microsoft OneDrive. These are all cloud services, which are servers for storing our data online.

It’s easy to use as you no longer have to worry about losing your data when copies of your files are in the cloud. It all costs a few dollars a month to store large amounts of data. So how do you choose just one?

I researched this question. past column About the best way to manage your smartphone photos. Based on my conversations with the technicians, the wisest approach is to choose a “device independent” service. This means a cloud service that is not exclusive to a particular brand. This leaves out iCloud, which mostly works for Apple products like iPhones.

If you want to switch to a different device, it’s important to choose a cloud storage service that gives you the freedom and flexibility to take your files elsewhere.

That’s why I often recommend people store their data in Google’s cloud. Google’s cloud-based apps for word processing, photo management, spreadsheets, and file storage run on Apple and Android phones. And in general, its tools are available through a web browser on any computer or smartphone.

On my Mac, I mostly type in a web browser using Google Docs. If I want to edit documents on a computer, I can use the same tool in a browser on Windows.

  • A solo hacker says he took North Korea offline: A US security researcher using the online name P4x told Wired that North Korean spies targeted him in a cyberattack last year. Frustrated at feeling that there was no visible response from US officials, P4x said: Hacked North Korea’s internet from living roomand took responsibility for the ongoing online power outages in the country.

  • Cleaning services for bad reputations: Rest of the World surveyed firms specializing in helping wealthy businessmen and politicians clear the internet of information they don’t like. The tech publication reports that reputation management firms often use bogus copyright claims and bogus legal notices to try to download online news articles from their clients that contain allegations of tax evasion, corruption or drug smuggling.

  • You buy everything online. How about cremation services??

I requested videos of sloths on Twitter and The Sloth Institute parked me to feed these long-legged wizards..

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