with a college dropout at the helm. Nor can we presume the next
horseman will arise in the United States—although it will certainly
have to conquer the U.S. market on its road to success.
We also can’t presume that the current Four Horsemen are all
guaranteed to hold their positions for decades to come. After all, IBM
ruled the electronics world through both the 1950s and 1960s... only
to lose ground in hardware and, in an amazing feat of leadership, shift
to a consulting company. Hewlett-Packard was the biggest tech
company in the world just a decade ago... only to lose ground under
weak leadership, and then be broken up. Microsoft terrified the entire
business world, especially tech, and seemed unstoppable in the 1990s.
Like the others, it remains a giant company, but no one still thinks of it
as an unstoppable juggernaut destined to rule the world.
Still, the current Four Horsemen, as I’ve tried to explain in the
previous chapters, have certain advantages—in products, markets,
stock valuation, recruiting, and management (who have assiduously
studied why those earlier giants stumbled). That makes it unlikely they
will lose their current dominance for a (human) generation or more
(famous last words). All have fought to get where they are—and they
won’t give up their leadership easily. Even when they collide against
each other, they seem to make room before the competition gets too
extreme. They, for now, seem (somewhat) content to coexist rather
than fight to the death.
Now, let’s look at the contenders.
Alibaba
In April 2016, a native online commerce company surpassed Walmart
to become the world’s largest retailer. It was inevitable, but the
surprise was that it was not Amazon that bested the Bentonville
behemoth—it was Jack Ma’s Chinese powerhouse, Alibaba.^1 To be fair,
that’s in part a function of Alibaba’s business model, whereby it acts as
a marketplace for other retailers—e-commerce and shopping, online
auctions, money transfers, cloud data services, and a host of other
businesses—and it is the $485 billion in “gross merchandise value”
(GMV) of products sold through Alibaba that beats Walmart. Alibaba