facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.
This comment sounds like the nirvana fallacy striking again.
There is no perfect metric for measuring something like overall market dominance.
Thanks to a series of supreme court rulings, the traditional approach has been to look at consumer harms. But that metric alone fails to account for the way modern large conglomerates make money: not by gouging the consumer, but by dominating entire industries.
So how else can you look at it?
Acquisition are just another lens. Is it an imperfect lens? Yes, of course. I challenge you to find an analysis that isn't.
But is it still meaningful? Yes, I absolutely think so! It is undeniably the case that these tech giants have used acquisitions as a way to protect their market position. So it absolutely makes sense to analyze their behaviour from that perspective.
Furthermore, this is a news article not a whitepaper. Yes, there is an enormous amount of nuance in this kind of argument, and if you were prosecuting these guys for antitrust violations in a court of law, you'd probably do a deeper dive.
> facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.
How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.
Exactly, and adding to that: what about the tons of smaller companies/startups bought for a unique technology that was implemented under the hood across major products of the tech giants? We don't know about them except if some former employee leaked it, most projects will be private/secret and the public at large will never heard about the impact.
Think lots of small "Doubleclick"-ish companies that were bought for a small set of features that were then transferred to major products.
Number of acquisitions is interesting, though, because you can also phrase it as "number of potentially viable independent companies that no longer exist". We are better off with more independent companies.
For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation.
That being said, I'm guessing no small number of these startups were setup with the express purpose of being bought out like this.
I have a theory that this is why MS treats its research division staff and interns so well. It reduces the amount of competitive pressure MS would face if they were all working elsewhere/on their own startups.
Focusing on real world metrics will give a very incomplete picture of the impact acquisitions might have had on the market.
Deja News was probably the biggest tech acquisition by a FAANG company. The average white collar worker spends ~6 hours a day in their Gmail, and about 5 min a day using search.
E.g. the email parsing code in Thunderbird dates back to at least the late 80s, and even after decades of working on it at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's still a work in progress.
The thesis of the articles seems to be: Big tech will stay dominant because they will keep buying lots of companies and they will likely continue to win with some. To stop this, blah blah law changes or something (I only skimmed the article).