Springtime is coming and we see the rise of a new era, which may end the domination of the big four like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. It will bring a new breed of companies and technologies, which have the chance to overcome the dominance because they are decentralized.

In the last months more and more people in politics and in eBusiness complained about the enormous power and marketdomination of the GAFAs. The scandal of Facebooks Cambridge Analytics breach, Apples incapability to keep up with their new technologies like Siri or ApplePay, Googles struggle with GDRP and privacy requirements or Amazons insatiable greed for domination in every market show that these big dinosaurs have become unable the cope with new developments. Their are more and more incapable to handle innovation and growth.

The panels in this years SXSW conference in Austin were dominated by the question of regulation and possible splitting of their monopolies and fines. This is an „easy“ and usually typical European call for the state to regulate.

But at the same time everybody only complains and asks for the state, nobody realizes, that we already begin to see a new future and a new breed of companies is coming and gaining power.

Let me bring some examples:

Telegram, the privacy alternative messaging app to Whatsapp, is skyrocketing to 200M monthly users almost doubling in 3 months. That is the same speed of growth as Facebook and WhatsApp had in their early days.
We see new models of publishing like Steemit and d.tube which democratize the way we produce media and content. Possibly platforms like these are to replace Twitter and Youtube.
Mobile payment is booming in Asian countries and creates new platform giants like Tencent.
With distributed ledger we see new ways of decentralized goods and services: Platforms like Blockstream with distributed apps bring a more private access to distributed content and services.
Clever companies like Synapse AI are putting customers back in control of their data and give them a chance to make money by selling their data to companies.

Decline of GAFA and Silicon Valley begins

The age of the GAFA complex which was born in a venture friendly Silicon Valley environment since the 1970ies is starting to see an end.

2017 was the first year where there was more capital raised in ICOs than in traditional venture capital.

As the USA, due to regulation on Crypto, is not allowing US-Companies and US-Citizens to initiate and participate in an ICO, we saw all the ICO money flowing to innovative countries like Singapore, Switzerland, Estonia or Japan.

Under the Trump administration this is not likely to change, resulting in a flow of fresh money and ideas away from the US. A not unlikely crash of the overvalued GAFA stocks may result in further decrease in in R&D and innovation investments.

The Next Decade is coming

Over the last decades we saw new economic and technological revolutions coming every ten years. In 1997/1998 the web revolution really started to evolve. We saw the rise of media companies like Yahoo and Amazon as well as the foundation of Google.

Ten Years later in 2007/2008 we saw a second phase in the development of the Internet. Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Twitter became dominant. With the launch of the iPhone the mobile web was boosted in everybody’s attentation on his smartphone screen. Web 2.0 brought the downfall of a lot of dominant traditional Internet companies like Yahoo, Nokia and AOL.

It is very likely that some years later we will look back on 2017/2018 in the same way and say: In these years the big GAFAs saw their doom and a new generation was born

What do you think?