Focus. Any Silicon Valley guru will tell you it’s the most important trait a tech company can have, and it’s true. In a world where tech can be applied to virtual anything, focusing on one sub-sector of it is often the key to success for a tech company, all the way from the startup to monopoly level. For the last few years, however, some of the biggest tech firms in the world have seemingly begun to ignore this fact, most notably: Google and Amazon. Over the past decade, these companies have strived to build ecosystems around their products and platforms, with the intent of locking users into their platforms and making it difficult for them to leave. Apple employs a similar practice, which can be seen in products such as their AirPods, which have seamless integration with the rest of their products, which in turn have seamless integration with each other. However, where companies like Google and Amazon are different than those like Apple is in the services and products they use to enforce their own ecosystems. While all of Apple’s ecosystem-reinforcing products seem to make sense and fit into said ecosystems nicely and clearly, Amazon and Google’s do so to a far lesser extent. For example, one way Amazon builds up its ecosystem is by building products for both enterprise and consumer markets, but these products don’t have clear lines that can be drawn to one another, and instead loosely fit into an overall ecosystem that is built out of much smaller ecosystems. This all has to do with the fact that, in this day and age, monopolies are essentially legal, and companies like Amazon and Google take advantage of this, spreading into as many different markets as they can. And they can afford to do this too, as even if they loose money in one category, they can subsidize those losses with the gains from their more successful products and categories, giving them a substantial advantage over smaller firms. But just as this practice gives companies like Amazon and Google a key advantage over smaller firms, it also means that they have a substantial weakness when compared to them as well, they can’t focus on that one subcategory as smaller firms can. And as companies like Amazon and Google grow and spread into more and more markets, their focus becomes more and more diluted, until they can’t apply sufficient focus to any of the markets they occupy, allowing smaller firms that can to beat them out and take over, slowly eating away at these monopolies until there is nothing left but a stumbling husk carrying the name of a company that once was synonymous with domination, domination that was destroyed by that company’s own lack of focus.