The Hidden DNA of Amazon - and Google

For anyone who is intrigued to learn more about current technological ecosystem. Plenty of insights on what turned those firms to become what they are + some super awesome advices re navigating your way as an employee or an entrepreneur.

Would highly recommend to anyone interested in branding, marketing and trend analysis. Scott Galloway gives a great insight on the key branding strategies that each of these ultra heavyweight companies.

His ideas are not always popular with the tech establishment, his insights can be controversial, he makes connections that others rarely see (sometimes till it's too late). But that is what makes Scott's work so important. He is going beyond the PR spin of Evangelical technologist to raise some hard questions. In many ways, this book shows just how our societal constructs (fiscal, information sharing, legislative) are built for an analogue era and need to be in many ways rethought. This book is a must read for anyone interested in these issues and wants to understand more about how we live in a new age dominated, with it's new rules which are in many ways being created by & for the Four.

Best narration ever by a professional (as opposed to the author).

This book, to me, is meant to encourage critical thinking, more than anything. I disagree with a lot of what Prof Galloway is claiming, and at times you can smell the manipulation of data or simple provocation for miles - but I didn't see it as "someone is trying to fool me". It feels more like an intelligent, well thought of argument - one that, even when I disagree with it, creates conversation and not hate. I would not go around calling him an idiot - far from it. This book made me rethink my own beliefs, so if anything, I owe this guy a drink and one hell of a discussion :-)

In this day and age, what more can we expect from anyone, right?

In "The Four: the Hidden DNA of the store, Apple, Facebook, and Google" NYU Stern professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway hails and indicts arguably the four most dominant tech platforms on the planet. The French branded them the GAFAs, from fear, resentment, and awe.

Jeff Bezos’s uber-retailer and logistics platform the store is Galloway’s favorite to be the first to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. It stands apart, relentlessly pursuing growth rather than profits. Thanks to its masterful storytelling – the ongoing pitch to retail investors – it has plenty of cheap capital and license to go whole-hog for growth.

He applauds the store’s culture of relentless experimentation and can-do attitude as distinctively “red, white and blue.” the store is an exemplar of American entrepreneurial culture, and has a willingness to try new ideas, and a tolerance for failure as part of the process. In contrast, European businesses are more likely to prefer the sins of omission to the sins of commission.

The Stern professor believes the store’s burgeoning and costly physical infrastructure is a defensive moat. While the marginal cost of delivering bits planet-wide is close to zero, we live in the physical world where infrastructure and capital to build it matter. Bezos has stores, warehouses, drones, trucks, and planes and delivery systems.

the store’s AI and robotics boost productivity. Yet Galloway bemoans the destruction of less efficient retailers and jobs. Would the world be better off if the store employed legions of laborers to guide customers, pack and ship, and had higher prices?

Apple’s cut from a different cloth. It’s a fabulous mobile platform but its defining difference is it’s “cool.”

Economist Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption holds some products have negative elasticity of demand. Up to a point, the more they cost, the greater demand. Demand for Rolex watches, Gucci bags, and iPhones is higher because everybody knows they’re pricier. Galloway contends “Apple’s business today is to sell to people goods, services, and emotions – being closer to God and being more attractive.” Apple products signal status.

Galloway worries because Apple is cool it’s held to different standard. For example, it refused to help the FBI break into a San Bernardino jihadist shooter’s iPhone. Palo Alto and Manhattan gentry were four-square with Apple. If, however, it had been Smith & Wesson not cooperating with law enforcement, the din of outrage from the same quarters would have been deafening.

The Stern professor lambastes legendary Steve Jobs as a decidedly unpleasant man, which by all counts he was, and for “stealing” Xerox Park’s GUI. Jobs commercialized something lots of people had seen. Hurrah for him, in this instance.

The wizards of Cupertino control 14.5% of the smartphone market, but capture a whopping 79% of the profits (2016). Not surprisingly highly-profitable Apple, not the store, is the most valuable company on the planet.

Galloway detours, railing against the caste system of prestigious universities, among which his NYU Stern numbers, and suggests Apple could upend it. But why would it want to? Galloway himself makes the case Brahmins signal others they’re Brahmins by using Apple. The hoi polloi use Samsung, Life’s Good and feature phones.

the store and Apple sell goods and services. Facebook and Google are two-sided markets with consumers and businesses using generally free services on one side, and advertisers on the other, paying. Galloway worries Facebook and Google are a news duopoly, a duopoly that vigorously resists being held to the same standards as traditional news organizations. A Gresham’s law of news is at work, where sensationalist blurbs and stories too-good-to-be-fact-checked drive out objective news.

Galloway implies they should police news disseminated over their platforms. Maybe, but their impartiality would be a concern. Neither Facebook’s nor Google’s founders and management are politically neutral. They lean left.

For Facebook the greater the number of and more engaged the users, the more valuable the platform is to other users and to advertisers. Given to hyperbole, Galloway declares Facebook may be the most successful thing in the history of mankind. To be sure, it’s a phenomenally successful social network and advertising platform. Yet has it been more successful than agriculture, industrialization, free-market capitalism, Christianity, banking, electricity, antibiotics and payment-card networks?

Google search, maps, video, email, browsers, and mobile OS have enormous utility. Hyperbolically Galloway describes Google as “a modern man’s god,” and “a religion,” and accurately as a public utility.

Its advertising platform has been voraciously monetizing content created by others. Galloway and Harbinger Capital tried ultimately unsuccessfully to persuade old-media dowager the NYT to more vigorously defend its content.

the store, Facebook and Google are marketing nirvanas which early evangelists of one-on-one marketing and authors of "Enterprise One to One" Peppers and Rogers could only dream of.

Galloway graphically revels in body metaphors to capture each of the four’s appeal, contending the store and Google appeal to the brain, Facebook to the heart, and Apple to the genitals.

He’s provocative and edgy, making him more quote-worthy and, presumably, boosting book sales. His more outrageous comments, however, are of a piece with what he criticizes Facebook and Google for doing, rewarding more incendiary and polarizing articles because people are more likely to click on them, generating ad revenue.

And, Galloway laces the book with gratuitous profanity, detracting from otherwise interesting and insightful commentary.
He’s simultaneously awestruck by and hypercritical of the four tech horsemen. He worries about their enormous market caps, relatively small number of employees, and implied job destruction. Facebook employs 17,000 whereas GM and IBM employed hundreds of thousands. Farming used to employ more than 90% of the workforce. Surely Galloway wouldn’t suggest society was therefore more prosperous.

The Stern professor conjures a straw man of the four tech horsemen creating a world with a few million lords and hundreds of millions of serfs. Yet technological progress is about delivering more with fewer people, thereby, improving their standard of living. Was agriculture using hand ploughs better because it employed more people? People migrate to new jobs and industries. That’s called progress. Galloway would do well to sip from futurologist Herman Kahn’s cup of boundless optimism about the proven capacity of free-market capitalism and technology to deliver mass prosperity.

Galloway decries the GAFAs organizing their businesses to minimize corporate taxes. Representing shareholders it is management’s job to do just that, legally. Perhaps Galloway should pen an op-ed for Bezos’s Washington Post urging reducing America’s corporate taxes from the highest in the developed world to zero, thereby eliminating the incentive to move business activities to more favorable tax climes offshore.

Do America’s tech oligarchs feel guilty? Forbes scores the store’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as the third and fifth richest men respectively on the planet. Both call for a minimum income, penance to be paid by Joe and Sally taxpayer.

Galloway seems to believe the GAFAs’ powerful platforms are eternal and that they’re vulnerable to each other, noting a majority of product searches are originated on the store not Google.

He takes a peculiarly static view. In their day, AT&T, IBM and Microsoft all were viewed as enjoying market power and invincibility. The US government brought antitrust actions against them, yet only AT&T enjoyed a state-sanctioned monopoly.

IBM lost its place because mainframes became relatively less important and it fumbled PC OS and desktop applications. In 1981 Big Blue launched PCs using MS-DOS, an operating system to which Microsoft retained the rights. It’s also worth recalling IBM and BellSouth in 1994 birthed the first smartphone: Simon. It sold 50,000 units. Simon was too early. The first iPhone wasn’t introduced until 2007.

Microsoft was indomitable until it wasn’t. First it was first beaten by Intuit in personal-finance software. Then Apple and Google crushed Mister Softie in the mobile OS space, and Google thrashed it in search.

Nobody knows what might displace any one of the four or when, but assuredly something will. None of the potential fifth horsemen Galloway analyzes however seem plausible.

There will be government challenges.

Brussels is viscerally hostile to US tech titans. It’s likely Facebook’s and Google’s data-drive-advertising business model will come under assault from the European Commission.

Of the four only Apple has survived its founders passing the baton.

Lastly, Galloway offers the reader career advice, provocatively as is his wont. If one is not aware of the tradeoffs pursuing a career as an investment banker versus saving the rain forest, pay attention. The Stern professor urges the ambitious to seek their fortunes in major cities. For those pursuing careers in the fours’ ecosystem that’s sensible. But neither NYC nor London is the best place to start a career in fracking, cattle or winemaking.

The four horsemen of technology have had a huge impact on commerce, social intercourse, and the news industry. Galloway’s "The Four" provides a framework for thinking about them, and is an eminently topical and worthwhile read.

Insightful, funny, intelegenet, and everything else you might expect from professor Galloway. Working in the tech industry for one of tech giants I completely agree with his analysis and love many of his takes on where the tech world is taking us. Easy read with many tips to take away. Highly recommend.

This is not the typical perspective on today's dynamics with which we are living because of the high speed development and impact of the most successful companies in the world. And though certain companies are shaping what our world is for each of our efforts to play/work and succeed, Gallagher reveals an advanced, timely perspective on how to be a successful participant in advancing our lives and fortunes.

Everyone should be reading this — especially policy makers and young people. The book is a coherent story that mirrors Maslow’s pyramid in a helpful way. Besides that the writer has a fantastic sense of humor. Definitely one of the best business books I’ve read and a must read for everyone.

While the title of this book is brilliant, the content fails to deliver. This book is not an analysis of company culture, it’s a pessimistic treatise against modern life. Rather than research what has made these companies so successful, to extract their “DNA”, Mr. Galloway strings together diatribe after diatribe about the way things used to be. Waste your time elsewhere, dear reader.

Most market savvy folks may already know the gist of what Scott writes in this book but it is refreshing to listen (Audible) to a candidly written book with company/market - specific insight. Great stuff!