Yahoo’s seemingly imminent demise, and the flip flop at the very top of the food chain – Apple taking back the title of the most valuable company in the world before you could say Alphabet – made me wonder about the next theatre of war. I’ve been fascinated with GAFA (is that AAFA now?) for a while, though I prefer the title that Scott Galloway gave them a year back – The Four Horsemen. If you haven’t seen his presentation from the DLD conference, you should. It gives a lot of perspective on the scale at which Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple operate, and the impact they are having on every other business there is.
The Four Horsemen symbolise conquest, and that’s what each of them are after. That’s also why I’m inclined to think that the fate of our species is increasingly tied to the fates of these four companies! While they are not busy fighting turf wars with the ‘smaller’ folks like Uber, Netflix, Slack, China etc, they are increasingly encroaching each others’ key focus areas – from shopping to providing internet to health to devices to social to VR to OS (phones, cars, things!) to content to.. you get the picture! This year, Scott’s presentation was on the same subject and titled ‘Gang of Four‘. It makes things even clearer!
Even as I have been searching for that one visual which can give me a sense of the areas of conflict, I think it’s fairly clear where, and how it will all come to a head – the “personal assistant”. Between the hardware, the media, cloud based services, and apps, they have, in different degrees, the key ingredients that can inform and influence our consumption behaviour – identity, intent, and interest. The personal assistant is where it all comes together – the social graph, the search graph, the shopping graph, the location graph, the payments graph and every other context we have consciously or unconsciously allowed the system to learn, which will allow it to predict/create seamless experiences.
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Siri vs Google Now vs M (not to forget WhatsApp) vs Alexa to decide who wins you. It has only just begun, and everything that all these four organisations have built, and will build, will go into this play. For complete dominance, until we have a new theatre of war.
P.S. I’d bet on Google, as the title suggests 🙂