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Big tech’s supersized ambitions

From metaverses to quantum computing

从玄武岩到量子计算

Is there any limit to the ambition and hubris of big tech firms? In October Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and described humankind’s new future in virtual worlds. On January 18th Microsoft, worth more than

69bn for Activision Blizzard, a video-games firm, in its biggest-ever deal. These decisions are part of a vast new investment surge at five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—call them maama. Together, they have invested $280bn in the past year, equivalent to 9% of American business investment, up from 4% five years ago.

大科技公司的野心和狂妄有什么限制吗？10 月，马克扎克伯格将 Facebook 更名为 Meta，并描述了人类在虚拟世界的新未来。1 月 18 日，价值超过 20 万亿美元的微软认为自己还不够大，以 690 亿美元竞购视频游戏公司动视暴雪，这是有史以来最大的交易。这些决定是美国最大的五家公司 Alphabet、Amazon、Apple、Meta 和 Microsoft，称其为 maama，新一轮大规模投资的一部分。在过去的一年里，他们总共投资了 2800 亿美元，相当于美国商业投资的 9%，而五年前是 4%。

Big tech wants to find the next big opportunity, and our analysis of deals, patents, recruitment and other yardsticks shows that cash is flowing into everything from driverless cars to quantum computing. The shift reflects a fear that the lucrative fiefs of the 2010s are losing relevance, and the fact that tech’s titans are increasingly moving onto each other’s patches (the share of sales that overlap has doubled since 2015 to 40%). So they are all looking to swoop into new territory.

大科技公司希望找到下一个大机会，而我们对交易、专利、招聘和其他标准的分析表明，现金正流入从无人驾驶汽车到量子计算的所有领域。这种转变反映了人们对 2010 年代利润丰厚的领地正在失去意义的担忧，也反映了科技巨头们正越来越多地进入对方的地盘（自 2015 年以来，重叠的销售份额已翻倍至 40%）。因此，他们都在寻求进入新的领域。

They also have an eye on the history of technology, which is littered with once-dominant firms that were brought down not by regulators, but by missing the next big thing. Fairchild Semiconductor ruled in the 1950s but now exists only in books. In 1983 ibm was America’s most profitable firm but eight years later was loss-making after botching the move from mainframes to pcs. Nokia, once seemingly invincible in mobile devices, fumbled the shift to smartphones. The maamas spent the 2010s fortifying commanding positions, in business tools for Microsoft, e-commerce for Amazon, social media for Meta, and so on. The pandemic has boosted demand, from bored couch-surfers to startups in need of cloud computing. Apple and Alphabet are now larger than were us Steel and Standard Oil, the two mighty monopolies of the 1900s, measured by profits relative to domestic gdp. Yet past performance is not indicative of future results, and now all of them are limbering up for whatever comes next.

他们还关注科技史，科技史上充斥着曾经占主导地位的公司，它们不是被监管者打倒，而是因为错过了下一个大事件。飞兆半导体公司在 20 世纪 50 年代曾是统治者，但现在只存在于书本中。1983 年，IBM 是美国最赚钱的公司，但 8 年后，在从大型机到个人电脑的转变过程中出现失误，导致亏损。诺基亚，曾经在移动设备领域似乎是无敌的，但在向智能手机的转变中却犯了难。2010 年代，马马虎虎地巩固了自己的地位，微软的商业工具、亚马逊的电子商务、Meta 的社交媒体，等等。这种流行病促进了需求，从无聊的沙发客到需要云计算的初创公司。苹果和 Alphabet 现在比美国钢铁公司和标准石油公司还要大，这是 20 世纪的两个强大的垄断企业，以利润相对于国内 gdp 来衡量。然而，过去的业绩并不代表未来的结果，现在所有这些公司都在为接下来的事情做准备

The problem is that nobody knows what it will be. But it will probably involve new physical devices that will supersede the smartphone as the dominant means of connecting people to information and services. Whoever makes such devices will therefore control access to users. This explains why Apple is planning a virtual-reality headset to compete with Meta’s Oculus range and Microsoft’s HoloLens. Alphabet, Apple and Amazon have also all placed expensive bets on autonomous cars. And vast sums are being spent on designing specialised chips, and pursuing new Approaches like quantum computing, to provide the processing power for whatever new devices emerge.

问题是，没有人知道它将是什么。但它可能会涉及新的物理设备，这些设备将取代智能手机，成为连接人们与信息和服务的主要手段。因此，无论谁制造这种设备，都将控制对用户的访问。这就解释了为什么苹果正在计划推出虚拟现实头盔，与 Meta 的 Oculus 系列和微软的 HoloLens 竞争。Alphabet、苹果和亚马逊也都在自动驾驶汽车上下了昂贵的赌注。大量资金正被用于设计专门的芯片，并追求量子计算等新方法，以便为任何新设备的出现提供处理能力。

The maamas’ other priority is creating software platforms that will allow them to extract rents, by drawing in users, and then relying on network effects to draw in even more. Hence Facebook’s renaming and its $10bn annual spending on immersive online worlds, known as the metaverse. Apple has been expanding the walled garden of services, it provides to users of its devices, moving into areas such as fitness classes and television shows. Buying Activision may help Microsoft provide a richer experience for its gaming customers, while Mesh, a platform for virtual 3d workplaces, is aimed at corporate users. The cloud-computing platforms operated by Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft literally charge rent to host computing environments for other companies.

MAAMAS的另一个优先事项是创建软件平台，使他们能够通过吸引用户来获取租金，然后依靠网络效应来吸引更多用户。因此，Facebook 重新命名，并在沉浸式网络世界上每年花费 100 亿美元，即所谓的 metaverse。苹果公司一直在扩大它为其设备用户提供的服务的围墙花园，进入健身课程和电视节目等领域。收购动视可能有助于微软为其游戏客户提供更丰富的体验，而 Mesh 是一个虚拟 3D 工作场所的平台，主要针对企业用户。Alphabet、亚马逊和微软运营的云计算平台实际上是收取租金，为其他公司托管计算环境。

Governments, rivals and billions of customers, who already fear these firms are too powerful, may be alarmed by all this. One view is that the companies’ large customer bases, and control of pools of data with which to train artificial intelligence (ai), give them an insurmountable advantage. Won’t the giants use that to squash rivals? Yet all these new areas look competitive for the time being. Many other firms are in the metaverse race, for example. “Fortnite”, made by Epic Games, has more than 300m players worldwide, while Roblox has 47m gamers who spend 3bn hours a month on its platform. Nvidia, a chip firm, is moving into the space, too. Even Microsoft’s Activision deal would raise its market share in gaming to only 10-15%—hardly a monopoly. In autonomous cars, big tech must contend with the likes of Tesla, gm and Volkswagen. Global startups raised $621bn of venture funding in 2021, far more than big tech invested. And new rivals have emerged with unexpected speed in some areas, such as TikTok in social media.

政府、竞争对手和数十亿客户已经担心这些公司过于强大，可能会对这一切感到震惊。一种观点认为，这些公司的庞大客户群，以及对用于训练人工智能（AI）的数据池的控制，使它们具有不可逾越的优势。难道巨头们不会利用这一点来压制对手吗？然而，所有这些新领域目前看起来都很有竞争力。例如，许多其他公司也在参与元气的竞赛。Epic Games 制作的 "堡垒之夜 "在全球拥有超过 3 亿玩家，而 Roblox 拥有 4700 万玩家，每月在其平台上花费 30 亿小时。芯片公司 Nvidia 也在向这个领域进军。即使是微软的动视交易，也会将其在游戏领域的市场份额提高到只有 10-15%，很难说是垄断。在自动驾驶汽车领域，大型科技公司必须与特斯拉、通用汽车和大众汽车等公司抗衡。2021 年，全球初创企业筹集了 6210 亿美元的风险资金，远远超过了大科技公司的投资。在某些领域，新的竞争对手以意想不到的速度出现，比如社交媒体的 TikTok。

Moreover, there is an outside chance that the new terrain will prove less prone to domination by centralised platforms. Deep-learning technology, the dominant form of ai today, relies on large amounts of data, but future forms of ai may not. Then there are the decentralised blockchain services owned and operated by users, loosely known as Web3. At the moment these have clunky interfaces, use up lots of energy and are not always as decentralised as they seem. But in one area—decentralised finance, or DeFi—rapid improvements are already under way.

此外，事实证明，新的地形不太容易被中心化的平台所支配，这也是一种外部机会。深度学习技术是当今人工智能的主要形式，它依赖于大量的数据，但未来的人工智能形式可能不会。然后是由用户拥有和运营的去中心化区块链服务，松散地称为 Web3。目前，这些服务有笨重的界面，耗费大量能源，并不总是像它们看起来那样去中心化。但在一个领域——去中心化的金融，或 DeFi——已经在快速改进。

Nonetheless, the temptation is for regulators to clamp down pre-emptively. In 2020 Lina Khan, who is now America’s top antitrust official, recommended that big tech firms be banned from expanding into adjacent areas. Some big antitrust cases may reach America’s courts by 2023. And Europe may soon pass a sweeping Digital Markets Act, aimed at regulating big technology companies “ex ante”—that is, constraining such firms’ behaviour upfront, rather than punishing them later with antitrust cases (Margrethe Vestager, the eu’s competition tsar, explains all on our Money Talks.

尽管如此，监管机构的诱惑是先发制人地进行打击。2020 年，现为美国最高反垄断官员的莉娜-汗建议禁止大型科技公司向邻近地区扩张。到 2023 年，一些大的反垄断案件可能会到达美国的法院。欧洲可能很快就会通过一项全面的《数字市场法》，旨在对大型科技公司进行 "事前 "监管--即预先限制这些公司的行为，而不是事后用反垄断案件来惩罚它们（欧盟的竞争事务主管 Margrethe Vestager 在我们的 "Money Talks "播客中解释了一切）。

Yet a lighter touch is the best policy. Investment in tech is linked to rising productivity, and the share of cashflows the tech giants are reinvesting has almost doubled since a decade ago. Trustbusters will struggle to predict the technologies of tomorrow. What they can do is block firms from doing deals that give them a monopoly position in new markets today. That is not yet a danger. Indeed, history suggests that tech giants are most often brought down by failing to master emerging technologies. If today’s giants want to spend billions trying to move into new areas to avoid that fate, so far there is no reason to stop them.

然而，轻装上阵是最好的政策。对科技的投资与生产力的提高有关，而科技巨头们再投资的现金流份额自十年前以来几乎翻了一番。信任者将很难预测明天的技术。他们能做的是阻止企业进行交易，使其在今天的新市场中获得垄断地位。这还不是一种危险。事实上，历史表明，科技巨头最常因未能掌握新兴技术而被打倒。如果今天的巨头想要花费数十亿美元试图进入新领域以避免这种命运，到目前为止，没有理由阻止他们。