Mossberg: Tech’s ruling class casts a big shadow

Back in 2011, I was talking with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, backstage at our D9 conference, when he made a casual reference to a “Gang of Four” companies that he believed ruled the consumer tech industry. Once on stage, I asked him about that term.

He explained that, in his view, there were four giant platform companies that dominated consumer tech: Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. “We’ve never had four companies growing at the scale those are, in aggregate,” he said.

“Each of the companies that I’ve mentioned,” he continued, “has managed to use very modern concepts of computer science [and] very, very aggressive scaling approaches to get large very quickly in the area they’re focused on.” He added: “These are...

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