Call it the Triumph of the Stacks. I attended Google I/O this week, and saw a lot of cool things: but what really hit home for me, at the keynote and the demos and the developer sessions, was just how dominant Google has become, in so many different domains … and, especially, how its only real competition comes from the four other tech behemoths who dominate our industry’s landscape.
Typically, Bruce Sterling saw it coming first, five full years ago:
“The Stacks” […] Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.
Today the five companies he cited are the five most valuable publicly traded companies on the planet, and practically a software oligopoly. They all make hardware, too, but of course there are many more important hardware companies: Intel, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor, Hon Hai, et al. When you talk about software, though — you know, the stuff that’s eating the world — then you’re almost certainly, if indirectly, ultimately talking about the Stacks.
Who in fairness are all doing amazing things. (Whether you like them or not, they’re still amazing.) Sundar Pichai mentioned during the I/O keynote that there are now more than two billion active Android devices on Earth. Most organizations are only beginning to think and talk about machine learning; Google has already woven it into a wide range of its products, ranging from little things like Android’s new smart text selection, to semi-automatic photo curation and sharing, to voice recognition and translation, to custom-build Tensor Processing Units providing petaflops of processing power available via Google’s cloud, and to what may be its biggest machine-learning breakthrough yet, coming later this year:
OK, I am reflexively skeptical, but Google Lens looks like it's awesome out of the gate, and eventually could be genuinely mind-blowing.