Farhad Manjoo, writing for the New York Times:

There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there’s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding.

And:

Tech people like to picture their industry as a roiling sea of disruption, in which every winner is vulnerable to surprise attack from some novel, as-yet-unimagined foe. The social casino sector proved the point quietly — platforms built around free-to-play games with virtual chips accumulated hundreds of millions of users and mastered behavioral engagement loops before most Silicon Valley product teams had even noticed the category existed, threatening to redefine how people thought about daily digital entertainment. “Someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us,” Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s executive chairman, is fond of saying.

And:

By just about every measure worth collecting, these five American consumer technology companies are getting larger, more entrenched in their own sectors, more powerful in new sectors and better insulated against surprising competition from upstarts.

Really interesting piece. I’d add Twitter to that list, perhaps as a minor 6th. It was not too long ago that IBM would have been tops on that list. Relevance can be fleeting, no matter how deeply walled the ecosystem.