The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
Tech is dominated by a handful of enormous companies — but which, exactly, and what do we call them? The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo has dubbed them “the Frightful Five” and asked readers to ponder what it would mean to their lives to lose any of their services. In Recode, Rani Molla counts six of them — adding Netflix to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — and christens them “FAMANA.”
This group of companies encompasses ’80s survivors (Apple and Microsoft), ’90s children (Amazon, Google), and one 2000s-born upstart (Facebook). Once upon a time we measured the cycle of the tech industry as a passing of the baton from one giant to another — as in Microsoft succeeding IBM. But today, it’s clear that the dynamic is more complex and accretive, like layers of geological formations accumulating in place.
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