Some very interesting points made in OP and comments. I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantag

Some very interesting points made in OP and comments. I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantages of scale. But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy system must be insane.) Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn a new system. This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is “good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught. The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate. My main point is that the general public has not become more technically skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused on making these services drop dead easy to use. Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in using alternative, less polished systems.