The Four
The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
by Scott Galloway, GALLOWAY SCOTT · first published 2017
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1recommended by
6HN commenters
2017–2025first – last mentioned
17% recommend83% neutral
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong.
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…certainly not a customer facing data services company, I still have no idea how they see themselves. Which would be useful information. A better (actionable) external narrative is Scott Galloway's The Four. I have no idea if Galloway's analysis is closer to the mark. But at least it's self-consistent. [http://www.thefourbook.com]
on “The Race to a Trillion” ↗Paraphrasing from the book The Four by Scott Galloway: Apple is a company that has positioned itself as a luxury brand. Apple is about sex and signalling. Carrying an Apple phone signals more status than if you were to carry an Android…
on “Amazon, Facebook and Google can all be beaten” ↗Just finished in the last week: - What a wonderful world by Marcus Chown - 47 Ronin by Joan D. Vinge - Practical Monitoring by Mike Julian Currently reading: - The Four by Scott Galloway - The Art of Capacity Planning 2nd Edition by Arun Kejariwal, John Allspaw
on “Ask HN: What books are you currently reading?” ↗Yes, L2 Inc research (see their YouTube channel) and the book "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google" by Scott Galloway.
on “Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales Up 38% to $60.5B” ↗Reading The Four by Scott Galloway, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon were dominating the market 7 years ago generating 2.3 trillion in wealth. They're worth double that now. The Four, especially with its AI, is going…
on “The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input” ↗I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".
on “Fair Pricing” ↗