The end of innovation

In this posting from the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program, MediaCom's Alex Kirk investigates just how forward-thinking the big tech companies really are

The biggest tech companies in the world are innovating – by doing exactly the same things as each other.

So, what I did here was to think up a list of all the main tech categories I could think of. (Click the table to enlarge.)

I’ve probably missed some, but this is a decent list. I then mapped that list against the five biggest “tech” companies (by market cap) in the world: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.

Then I filled in the boxes where each company is active – et voila! These innovative, forward-thinking, ground-breaking companies are basically all doing the same stuff as the others.

Here are some fun out-takes:

  • Every single category has an average minimum involvement of four of the big five companies.
  • On average, out of these twelve categories, each of the big five is involved in eight of them.
  • Google is involved in all of them; Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have fingers in ten or eleven of them.
  • One-third of all categories involve all five companies
  • Out of all the categories I listed, only one has less than four of the big five involved – social media. Facebook is built on it, Google is still no good at it and Microsoft bought their way in via LinkedIn. But for something that was so massive as a topic only a few years ago, it stands out as yesterday’s news.
  • At this point, it seems like less a conversation about which technology will change our lives next, and more a question of just whose logo will be on it.

Alex Kirk is head of systems and automation at MediaCom

This article is part of the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program. See more from the program by clicking on the banner below.

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