Not the companies, the term.
(somebody asked me if FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) should be the targets of anti-trust action.)
FANG is, in the first case, only a term used by Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers to talk about the most successful parts of the IT markets that they actually don't understand. Meaning their lazy asses won't bother to do analysis on any particular company because they are in fact market makers who sell market making to their customers, who also don't give a rat's ass about the details of a company. They leave that business to VCs who are also playing wheel of fortune shotgun whack a mole with other people's money and some of their own disposable capital.
FANG is, in the first case, only a term used by Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers to talk about the most successful parts of the IT markets that they actually don't understand. Meaning their lazy asses won't bother to do analysis on any particular company because they are in fact market makers who sell market making to their customers, who also don't give a rat's ass about the details of a company. They leave that business to VCs who are also playing wheel of fortune shotgun whack a mole with other people's money and some of their own disposable capital.
In other words and in short, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are conglomerates primarily *because* bankers and investment bankers don't know jack about their component businesses enough to loan them money. That's how this whole industry got started and that's why startups are startups, and why all this non-traditional financing happened in the first place. There is a generation of people with money and power who decided to stay asleep. Zuckerberg's no genius, he simply capitalized on an abandoned field.
Every major corporation in the Fortune 100 has more than enough capital to hire 200 software engineers that could be the next big thing. Almost none of them have the culture, the experience or the balls.
Guess what else? Most of the companies who get close to an understanding of what anti-trust actually would mean in this industry are part of the problem. How on earth could anybody suggest going after anti-trust NOT talk about Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP or Oracle?
Finally, this is quite a joke because most of the smart money is on free software. The software industry is still too chaotic for most of the old bastards to understand or trust. They simply cannot comprehend the business models and they don't understand the network effect of value that these companies create. They can't wrap their heads around decentralization itself.
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