Looking beyond the scale and the network effects, though, there’s a difference in character. Google, Facebook and Amazon are still controlled by their founders, and they’re aggressive street fighters. All of these companies have the benefit of twenty years more history - they saw what happened to Microsoft, and Yahoo, and AOL, and MySpace. So, they will disrupt themselves, and they will act. The shift to mobile was a fundamental structural threat that unbundled Facebook - the founder spent over 10% of the company to buy the most successful unbundlers and, as importantly, didn’t smother them after he’d bought them, unlike most large acquirers of disruptive companies. Just as index funds don’t work if everyone’s an index fund, you could propose that ‘Disruption’ doesn’t work if everyone’s read the book, and everyone has. This, to repeat, is compounded by scale, both for strategic shifts (such as chips) and for people: the big tech companies have hired a huge proportion of the stock of academic machine learning researchers in the last few years, paying huge (cash!) salaries and offering both freedom and the chance to deploy something real to billions of people. Not everyone takes the money (Evan Spiegel didn’t), but not every engineering or product genius wants to be an entrepreneur and sleep like a baby - to wake up every hour and scream.

That is, the new platforms have created unprecedented opportunities - 3bn smartphone users today are an unprecedented ‘white space’ for company creation. But they often expand into that space themselves, both on their own platform (an old problem, of course, seen at Microsoft in the past), and using their leverage to try to seize any new white space that opens up and may be a threat (Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram and trying to squash Snap). These impulses are not new: Microsoft was hardly a friendly competitor and Intel’s Andy Grove famously said that only the paranoid survive, but the ability to act on them is different - GAFA can do more and much bigger things than Microsoft ever could. My colleague Chris Dixon calls them ‘super-evolved organisms’ - they’re arguably more aware of where threats may come from, and certainly more able to respond.

On the other hand, both in tech and the broader economy, large, dominant companies don’t last. You lose the market or the market becomes irrelevant. Nokia had close to half of the mobile handset market a decade ago and lost it all; IBM still has the mainframe market but no-one cares. Few people can predict where the change will come from, but it does come. GAFA are very visibly conscious of that - Google experiments with everything, Apple is working on cars and mixed reality, and Facebook bought not just Instagram and WhatsApp but Oculus. But then, Microsoft was working on smartphones and mobile devices 20 years ago, and now it’s killed Windows Mobile, acknowledged that the PC is going the way of the mainframe and, like IBM, has to make its way in a market shaped by other companies. There probably won’t be a technology that has 10x greater scale than smartphones, as mobile was 10x bigger than PCs and PCs were bigger than mainframes, simply because 5bn people will have smartphones and that’s all the (adult) people. There will be something, though, and though ’something will change, but we don’t know what’ is an unfalsifiable point, so is ‘nothing will change’, and I know which side of that argument I find more likely.