Amazon.com, Inc.^[7] (/ˈæməzɒn/ AM-ə-zon) is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as “one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world”,^[8] and is one of the world’s most valuable brands.^[9] It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington,^[10] on July 5, 1994. Initially an online marketplace for books, it has expanded into a multitude of product categories: a strategy that has earned it the moniker The Everything Store.^[11] It has multiple subsidiaries including Amazon Web Services (cloud computing), Zoox (autonomous vehicles), Kuiper Systems (satellite Internet), Amazon Lab126 (computer hardware R&D). Its other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, Freevee, and Whole Foods Market. Its acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially increased its footprint as a physical retailer.^[12]

Amazon has earned a reputation as a disruptor of well-established industries through technological innovation and mass scale.^{[13][14][15][16]} As of 2021, it is the world’s largest online retailer and marketplace, smart speaker provider, cloud computing service through AWS,^[17] live-streaming service through Twitch, and Internet company as measured by revenue and market share.^[18] In 2021, it surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest retailer outside of China, driven in large part by its paid subscription plan, Amazon Prime, which has over 200 million subscribers worldwide.^[19][20] It is the second-largest private employer in the United States.^[21]

Amazon also distributes a variety of downloadable and streaming content through its Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch, and Audible units. It publishes books through its publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, film and television content through Amazon Studios, and has been the owner of film and television studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer since March 2022. It also produces consumer electronics—most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs.

Amazon has been criticized for customer data collection practices,^[22] a toxic work culture,^[23] tax avoidance,^[24][25] and anti-competitive behavior.^[26][27]

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation which produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue;^[3] it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue as of 2016.^[4] It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta.

Microsoft (the word being a portmanteau of “microcomputer software”^[5]) was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company’s 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016,^[6] followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011.^[7]

As of 2015, Microsoft is market-dominant in the IBM PC compatible operating system market and the office software suite market, although it has lost the majority of the overall operating system market to Android.^[8] The company also produces a wide range of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), the digital services market (through MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).

Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, and later envisioned a “devices and services” strategy.^[9] This unfolded with Microsoft acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008,^[10] entering the personal computer production market for the first time in June 2012 with the launch of the Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquisition of Nokia‘s devices and services division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud computing, a move that helped the company’s shares reach its highest value since December 1999.^[11][12]

Earlier dethroned by Apple in 2010, in 2018 Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.^[13] In April 2019, Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion after Apple and Amazon respectively.^[14] As of 2020, Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation.^[15]

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that focuses on artificial intelligence,^[10] search engine, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, and consumer electronics. It has been referred to as the “most powerful company in the world” and one of the world’s most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the area of artificial intelligence.^{[11][12][13][14]} It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s Internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.^[15]

The company has since rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services beyond Google Search, many of which hold dominant market positions. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation (Maps), cloud computing (Cloud), web browsing (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photo), video calling (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Fitbit), gaming (Stadia), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (TV), artificial intelligence (Assistant), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and more. Discontinued Google products include Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail.^[16][17] Other areas of interest to Google include quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), and transformer models (Google Brain).

Google and YouTube are the two most visited websites worldwide followed by Facebook and Twitter. Google is also the largest search engine, mapping and navigation application, email provider, office suite, video sharing platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web browser, ML framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured by market share. On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes^[18] and fourth by Interbrand.^[19] It has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of its monopoly position.