At the moment there is a lot of talk about the big four technology companies: Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. This interest is oriented towards their roles as monopolies within the spaces they occupy. For most of these, it seems rather straightforward that they have a significant amount of power. Google is the go to search engine, with vast majority of the search on the internet. Amazon is the marketplace for goods online and controls the largest cloud hosting provider in addition to many other services. Facebook and Instagram are the largest social networks. The problem is that when we come to Apple, their monopoly is less apparent.

Apple’s computers aren’t dominant, with MacOS being dwarfed by Windows, and iOS is losing to android as well. Apple doesn’t compete in the server space. where Linux is the main player. Yet despite not having majority market share in any category, Apple is still the most valuable company on the planet. If you restrict your markets to wealthy countries, Apple begins to be a more dominant player, starting to control half or more of mobiles and slightly more of the PC space. This would suggest that Apple sells a more premium product that is pricing out many potential consumers. A result of this is the status associated with their products, however I don’t think this explains their success entirely.

I believe that Apple’s success is due to their shipping of solutions rather than individual products. A common phrase heard about the products is the way they interact inside the “Apple ecosystem”. This phrase refers to the way that all the Apple products manage to “talk” to each other,. interacting to create seamless transitions between devices. This enables their users to take calls on their computers and share bluetooth ear buds between a phone and a tablet. This encourages people who own an existing Apple device to get another one in order to benefit from the ecosystem, while also increasing the friction for them buying a device from a different manufacturer. A result of their wealthier customers means that they are able to produce a number of accessories targeting their demographic such as the apple watch.

This ecosystem makes them more difficult to analyse as a monopoly. They fail to have significant market presence in the global markets, although their presence is greater in wealthier countries. It seems to me that they have developed significant vertical integration in order to differentiate their products. Has their differentiation created a new market? I don’t know about that, but they have created a solution rather than a group of seperate products.

Because of this, I’m not sure if they constitute a monopoly. There isn’t clear lines to break them up like there is in the other big tech companies. I mean, even Microsoft, the 5th of the 4, has clearer lines with which to break up the company. While I think they do have a questionable amount of market power, I don’t understand how to divide them fairly due to the tight integration of their products.