I must admit when I saw this pie-chart breakdown of US companies I found it a bit shocking. How did the ‘FAMGA’ Big Five get so much bigger than anyone else so quickly? I’ve been saying to clients and anyone that will listen that ‘the integrators will win’ for quite some time now, and I think that’s part of the Big Five story. The ones that own the data have the best opportunity to reach the top of the pile, and certainly these five organisations appear to have the majority of it.

So, I then figured, how does all this tie up with Jagdish Sheth’s classic management text, ‘The Rule Of Three’, a book that says every industry will eventually converge to three players. Maybe the five ‘integrators’ are merely part of the divergence that comes for any new industry before the convergence takes place?

Actually, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Complex even.

Another of my unproven, largely unexplored, hypotheses is that the industrial world will ultimately converge according to the TRIZ Law Of System Completeness. There will be three Engines, three Transmissions, three Tools, three Interfaces, and three Sensors. And, with the whole ‘integrator wins’ idea in mind, eventually, three higher level Coordinators.

It seems clear to me that each of the Big Five are trying to capture that ‘Coordination’ position. But, positioning them on the various elements of the Completeness Law, I was struck by how they so neatly split across the other five elements:

Each is already the biggest (by some considerable margin) of their respective Law element players. They, of course, have competitors within these elements. Thus Apple – who’s still largely in the device business (hence, ‘Tool’) – experiences increasingly fierce competition from Samsung, LG and, catching up fast, Huawei within their ‘Tool’ world. Apple, I’m sure knows this, and hence their desire to climb to the top Coordinator position.

When the markets value you at $1T and you have almost as much sat in the bank waiting to spend, you’re probably well placed to achieve any goal you set your mind to. That said, whether they will be able to out-compete the other four Big Five players to take one of the three available coordinator places I’m not sure. When we look at this kind of upward migration move at lower levels in the global systems hierarchy, the eventual three winners tend to come from Engine, Transmission and Sensor elements. Which, if this part of the theory holds true, probably means I should be putting most of my eggs in the Alphabet basket. Plus they seem to be the player with the highest Innovation Capability Maturity of the Five. So they might just have to do a bit more actual innovating before they lock the whole global industrial system down and kill wide-scale innovation for the next fifty years. Have a great day.