The tech industry is dominated by 5 big companies — here’s how each makes its money

More and more, everything crucial about the present and future of consumer tech runs through at least one of five companies: Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Smartphones, laptops, app distribution, voice assistants and AI, streaming music and video, cloud computing, online shopping, advertising — whatever it is, chances are it runs through the oligopoly in some way. The list of startups that have bought by the big five, meanwhile, is almost too long to count.

Each of the five make great products, to be clear, but it’s hard to deny that they control how tech money flows.

How each of those companies make their revenues, though, varies wildly. As this recent chart from Visual Capitalist shows, each of the big five hold their empires on the back of different industries. Google's parent company Alphabet, for all the dabbling it does, is an online advertising company first and foremost. Facebook is, too. Apple is a hardware company through and through, while everything about Amazon flows from its e-commerce business.

Though it’s still the dominant player in PCs, Microsoft stands out as the only tech giant with diversified sources of revenue. It has Windows, of course, but with the PC market in decline, it’s also getting significant gains from Office, the Azure cloud business, Xbox, ads, and various other businesses.

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(Mike Nudelman/Business Insider/Visual Capitalist)

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