I just finished reading “The Four”, written by NYU business school professor Scott Galloway. Overall, I am quite impressed by the insights offered in this book. They are in-depth and thought-provoking, well deserved to be a best-seller. The language used in this book is sometimes explicit, but witty through-out. There are a few points that I feel the urge to make some commentary on.
- The book emphasizes heavily on the market value for the four companies. Market value is a popular metric, but also subject to high volatility and oftentimes hype driven. I felt kind of bored after reading the astronomical numbers a few times, especially when a company’s market value is compared to a country’s annual GDP (I don’t even think it makes sense in semantics). After all, market value is a medal won after some remarkable achievement is made, not the reason the achievement happened in the first place.
- The author was ever in upper management of NYT and his personal perspective on how Google destroyed the newspaper’s ad business is eye-opening. However, his proposal to not let Google crawl the newspaper’s content, plus forming a content producer alliance of media to resist the invasion of Google, would not have saved the industry in my opinion. Google’s technology to collect comprehensive web results and display them to users fastly is the killer feature. NYT’s content is valuable, but too easily dwarfed by the content produced by the masses in a gig economy. Turning down Google prevents it from eating a slice of your pie, but it also means no pie may be delivered to you at all and you will be the first to starve to death.
- The analogy of Apple to a luxury brand like Hermes is something I totally don’t agree with. Also, Apple does not win by appealing to the sex desire of people, like the author claims. In my understanding a luxury brand is something you still crave to own at an unreasonable expense even though there are functionally equivalent substitutes at a normal price, and Apple apparently doesn’t fall under this category in the present world. Outsiders often attribute Apple’s success to its aesthetic design; very few mention that the design boosts the product’s durability, longevity and ease of use. Exemplifying the company’s high margin by subtracting iPhone’s material cost to sales price is a cliche that should not be in a book written by a business school professor. It would be much more interesting to discuss why Apple is so good at adding value to commodity electronic parts and squeezing vendors to get the most cutting edge supplies.
- I had mixed feelings on the book’s stance of supporting breaking down the four to allow benign competition and increase overall shareholder value across the society. I don’t doubt the benefits. However, there is a reason the big four happened in the U.S. but not elsewhere. Punishment based on size seems unfair and could undermine America’s competitiveness in the long run.
Overall, I found that book pretty fun to read despite having a snobbish title and cover (understandable, as this book might not have been circulated and reach masses without such a title and cover). Even if you have some prior understanding of the Four, it makes your ideas better crystallized and stimulates more thinking.