> GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardles

> GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are. That's an interesting thought. Is it Google or Amazon or Facebook? Amazon: AWS + retail + Alexa + Kindle + Prime. Everything about Amazon (going even further back than Google), for the most part, has been Internet based. They're clearly an Internet conglomerate. AWS is a drastically bigger deal for the Internet than Gmail, YouTube or GMaps; AWS is a present or future $600-$800 billion company by itself. Alexa owns the smart speaker market. Amazon is close to being an online retail monopoly. Prime is the world's largest loyalty lock-in program, which none of the other tech giants have (they have various leveraged network moats instead). Facebook: FB core, FB messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram. I think FB's combination is at least as potent today as GSearch + YouTube + Gmail + GMaps. How quickly FB's sales have grown rather speaks to that as well. I think GSearch has a plausibly more enduring position than Instagram though. And if you remove Instagram then FB's upside drops off dramatically, it's a shaky position that can be threatened. WhatsApp isn't worth much commercially (relatively speaking) and probably never will be, that acquisition was a competition removing action by FB. As Instagram ages, it'll face an endless line of cooler TikToks vying to rip its userbase away (young people not wanting to be where the old people are or where the last thing was), that process will never stop because social networks are almost always built on trend / fashion / cool and as they age they shed the cool factor. What threats have GSearch and YouTube faced? Not much, it's far harder to compete with them than it is to build the next small social homerun and scale it if it hits. Today, and for this decade, FB is probably as great of a conglomerate as Google, however I would rather own Google's properties than Instagram and WhatsApp (if FB had shown an ability to rapidly spin up new products to catch each cool wave, that would be different; but the exact opposite has happened, FB is risking turning Instagram into Frankenstein's monster, contorting it to keep up with each upcomer like Snapchat and then TikTok).