They're predators now, look at how they buy up new promising tech companies and then destroy them, it's like when EA in the '90s started buying up smaller studios and shutting them down and doing nothing with the IP's, or even recently Fitbit buying up smaller watchmakers just to have their workers and not using the tech that made them semi-popular...

Google and Apple have a duopoly on cellphones in the USA, not even Microsoft could compete with them. Facebook is the social network when young people decided they didn't want to use a social platform that even grandma was on, they moved to Instagram... Facebook bought them... They are no longer innovators, they are buyers...

I'd also point out that outside of the US, Apple's market share is even smaller making Google Android pretty much the Phone OS.

Amazon, while it may not buy up everything in its path, it does cut prices so low that nobody can compete. The only reason their Kindle division has started floundering is because ebook prices are now set by the publisher and not Amazon, this is on purpose because now publishers can say this is the price of our product, this is our value, because publishers hate how Amazon buys hardback and paper copies and discounts them about 50% plus. This creates a price monopoly... but the simple economics learned from Walmart is that at some point they will have enough of a market share that those prices will creep up and up and up...

this NY TIMES series sounds like promotion