mention the Justice Department doesn’t care about little companies
until they get big. When history is written, by the winners, terms such
as inspired by and benchmarked replace less savory terms.
The sins of the horsemen fall into one of two types of cons. The
first is taking—which often means stealing IP from other companies
and repurposing it for profit, only to viciously protect that IP once
they’ve amassed a lot of it. The second is profiting from assets built by
someone else in a manner unavailable to the originator. The first
means that the future horsemen don’t have to depend upon their
native ingenuity to come up with innovative ideas—and throwing
lawyers at those who try the same thing to them means they won’t be
victims, too. The second is a reminder that the so-called first-mover
advantage is usually not an advantage. Industry pioneers often end up
with arrows in their backs—while the horsemen, arriving later
(Facebook after Myspace, Apple after the first PC builders, Google
after the early search engines, Amazon after the first online retailers),
get to feed off the carcasses of their predecessors by learning from
their mistakes, buying their assets, and taking their customers.
Con #1: Steal and Protect
Great companies often rely on some sort of lie or IP theft to accrue
value at a speed and scale previously unimaginable, and the Four are
no different. Most horsemen have fostered a falsehood that cons other
firms, or the government, into a subsidy or transfer of value that
dramatically shifts the balance of power to them. (Just watch Tesla
over the next few years as it fights for government subsidies for solar-
and electric-powered cars.) When they emerge as a horseman,
however, they are suddenly outraged at this sort of behavior and seek
to protect their gains.
This dynamic can be seen even more starkly with countries. In the
geopolitical context, there is only one horseman, the United States of
America, and its history demonstrates this dynamic. In the period
immediately following the Revolution, the United States was a scrappy
start-up, with plenty of opportunities but little capability to exploit
them. In Europe, industrial innovation—the Industrial Revolution—