How the Big 4 Impact our Personal and Professional Lives

 

I once heard a Toronto entrepreneur for the Rogers Communication company give a speech about choice in the marketplace. He said customers make choices on what they can buy, but those choices are provided by the organizations selling those products. In other words, "a customer's choice" is pre-selected for him/her by those who own the means of production. Nonetheless it is still a choice, all be it limited. This selection of choice is no less apparent than with Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

The big 4 are so prevalent in our lives that it's hard to imagine life without being influenced by 1 or all of these 4 companies. Probably no different than households being influenced by the industrial revolution or the introduction of automobiles into the marketplace many decades ago. Technology has become more of a need than a want. Wants are always greater than needs. But converting a want into a need is far more profitable. It creates a form of dependence on a product, which is exactly what has occurred with Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Take travel 25 years ago, for instance. Flights were booked via travel agents, and often group travel deals were popular. Maybe even travellers cheques were used. Calling on a land line to book hotels was the norm. All this planning took days, weeks or months. Now, to book a flight one need only to do a Google search for an available hotel or flight, pay online using a credit card or bank transfer, save the receipt or flight bar code on the phone (to be scanned during pre-boarding), and wait to eventually board a flight. All these steps can be done within minutes of each other. The time between completing a transaction and enjoying one's purchase is negligible. Compared to 25 years ago and today, transactions are so much faster and efficient. But, what is the price we pay for this efficiency?

Big brother is ever more prevalent than before. George Orwell's book 1984 is perhaps a past reminder of how much further we have come into the world of technology. The big 4 play a huge part in that role, whether it be someone filming a crime in action and posting it on Facebook; CCTV cameras catching suspected criminals, and having it posted on YouTube; or DNA in databases being used to discover missing persons or long lost relatives which a quick Google search on a MacBook might be able to find.

Perhaps at a closer look Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon may appear to be working more as an oligopoly, rather than allowing the invisible hand of laissez-faire economics to take it's natural course. Makes one think whether innovation is contrived and limiting, rather than allowing creativity to bolster.

Of course, it looks like we Westerners are overwhelmed with the big 4. But, it's nothing compared to how China has embraced technology. Having recently lived in China for a while, Alibaba has far surpassed Amazon in every way shape and form. Physical money is virtually obsolete in China's arena of hyper competition. Even the person selling food along the street uses a bar code to have customers pay via WeChat or AliPay apps. One phone number or one email address connects your bank account, to your WeChat app, and pays for everything with a quick phone swipe across a bar code. When and if the West will ever catch up to China electronically is yet to be seen. It's just another testament to the power of influence that the big 4, and some even bigger tech giants have over the everyday lives of everyday people.

John Bates in his book Thingalytics, details how connected devices today far surpass the number of humans on earth. We have seen the Internet of Things change from 500 million connected devices in 2003, to over 50 billion connected devices in 2020. This growth, which the big 4 are a monumental part of, have made not so much a Leviathan of Things, but more so a Perspective of Things, which has undoubtedly changed our everyday lives forever.