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So, a number of companies here in the US, especially in the tech world, and especially B2C, have low variable costs and high fixed costs. That is, it costs them very little to service an additional customer (usually just some extra server time), but they have to pay a lot of fixed costs (things like software engineers to write software) that don't change regardless of how many customers they have.
If you are a company in an economic situation like that, it is extremely bad to be small, because you are paying those high fixed costs without revenue from a large customer base. That means that it is absolutely vital to grow as quickly as possible, to get out of the "being small" stage. It's imperative to expand your userbase as quickly as possible.
An added factor is that a number of companies
like those doing social media
work in an area where network effect is a factor. There, the value of the service to existing customers that the company provides rises as the userbase expands. The total value of the service to all customers is something like the square of the size of the userbase. For companies like this, becoming large is even more important.
So what a number of companies in this area have done is to get a lot of capital from investors and then run a "growth phase", during which they accept very large losses to grow quickly for as long as they can get investment capital to keep growing. They don't worry about making money much or at all during this phase
they just want to be as appealing as possible, to get as many users as possible, and get out of the "being small" phase. They cover the losses with investment dollars; investors understand that this is part of what they're signing up for. Then, later, the companies have a "monetization phase" where they worry about being profitable. Usually, that phase has the companies doing things that users like less (since not doing things that might deter users from signing up was one thing that they did to grow quickly).
Cory Doctorow coined the phrase enshittification for the transition between the two phases; the user experience in the monetization phase tends to be worse in some ways than during the growth phase.
AI companies are all pretty young (at least, as regards their AI aspects; some are existing companies moving into the space), and are in the growth phase now.
Speedrunning late stage enshittification, really.
yeah that's a good explanation why there's only a very small number of software companies in the world. google, microsoft, apple, meta. the reason is because, when you have two cars, that's twice as much as one car. but when you have 2 apps, that's worth exactly as much as having 1 app.
consider this: scenario 1: one big company writes one calendar app that everybody uses. scenario 2: there's two medium-sized companies writing calendar app, that share the users. Which is better?
two companies -> twice the fixed cost (writing the code twice for no reason). two database protocols -> incompatibilities, so users sharing data with each other becomes more difficult, for example for group calendars where events are distributed to the app that the user already has. this is also called "network effects": removing boundaries by everything being on one platform.
downsides of monopolies: one company might have too much market determining force. no competition, therefore difficult to evaluate what would happen if things were done differently.
that's why there's no second search giant besides google. for mobile and desktop operating systems there's two, probably to have some competition (android/iOS, windows/macOS).
meanwhile there are no such monopolies for car companies, because if you build twice as many cars, then you have twice as many cars. so competition pays off.
There are many more software companies in the world then those four, including very small ones. It is still possible to make a reasonable living as such a small software company, though a lot harder than it used to be.