Mossberg: Tech’s ruling class casts a big shadow

Back in 2011, I was talking with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, backstage at our D9 conference, when he made a casual reference to a “Gang of Four” companies that he believed ruled the consumer tech industry. Once on stage, I asked him about that term.
He explained that, in his view, there were four giant platform companies that dominated consumer tech: Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. “We’ve never had four companies growing at the scale those are, in