Infocom convergence war: Apple vs Google vs Facebook vs Amazon

The magazine Fast Company discusses this month the actual infocom war which oppose 4 corporate titans involved in many infocom sub-sectors. CNBC made an interview with the editor-in-chef.

It appears that very recently you could describe these 4 titans in few words: Apple did consumer electronics. Google did search, Amazon a web store and Facebook a social site. Each tech titan pushing further into mobile tablets, apps, cloud data and beyond. Fast Company offers four scenarios where each titan could emergence as a big winner of this tech war.

"In some ways their competition with each other will continue to elevate them ahead of the rest of the pack, but their actions and their ambitions are driving them into each other's areas. whether that's Google launching a social network, Amazon launching an ipad competitor, these companies are definitely looking for the same larger opportunities in mobile and media and data. and that's driving them into each other's areas. You know, at the same time they are setting the agenda for wide swaths of the rest of the economy. it's other folks who are forced to respond and react to what these guys are doing... I think the question here for investors is where will the profits go? right now apple is in the driver seat in terms of how big their profits are, the cash they're generating, the growth we're seeing from them.

But to put it in retail terms, this is like a battle between the Nordstrom, Walmart and Target models. i put Apple in the Nordstrom category, Google and Facebook are more Walmart. You sort of trade convenience for a little bit more of an open ecosystem but doesn't work quite as well. and Target is more of Amazon's model. They're really selling commerce, all these other things are feeding you into buying things from Amazon. I think that's the real issue is which one of those models wins out. I think they're all at slightly different life stages too. amazon ig@ on track to be the fastest company to reach $100 billion in revenues projected by I think 2015. That's tremendously fast."

"At the same time as you mention, Apple is making so much money and i think it takes apple about nine days to generate what Facebook generates in a year in revenue. But Facebook does have 800 million customers, right? users, and they have data from those folks on what they like and how they end up using that data may be tremendously valuable in the years ahead... How do you define actually winning? is it the amount of money they make, their entrepreneurship and innovative skills or the products they put out. or is it all of that? certainly from an investing point of view making money's important."

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000051097

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com