Big Tech is the Ruling Ring for the world's industries

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring has a brilliant quote about the Ruling Ring that controls the 19 rings of Elves, Dwarves and Men… “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

- Sunil Rajguru

Big Tech is the Ruling Ring of the global economy, becoming more and more indispensable in each and every industry with each and every passing day. Digitization or digitalization or digital transformation is heading toward cent per cent, especially in the aftermath of the technological acceleration (techceleration) unleashed by the pandemic. Before tech helped a great deal, but today without it your business is as good as dead.

BIG OIL

There was a long era of the oil giants. Standard Oil was so large that it was split up. The pieces themselves started throwing their weight around. The seven major oil companies, called the Seven Sisters, dominated the 20th century. In this century, the first company to touch a market capitalization of $1 trillion was PetroChina. But that was the past. Today all the companies in that club are tech companies: Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Elon Musk’s Tesla (A3M3).

The reasons that the tech companies are dominating are varied. Oil and diesel run mechanical devices and served the internal combustion engine well for such a long time. Now the energy industry is going smart and high-tech. Batteries are getting smaller and smaller. Soon they will be able to run a lot of things that legacy fossil fuels were used to. Every device will be smart and run on power that need not come from fossil fuels.