Competition is Intensifying in the Core Areas of Tech Giants

While the top five U.S. tech companies -- Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook -- all have different core businesses, they often collide with each other in different areas. Apple's latest foray into search is a sign of intensifying competition among the tech giants in their core areas.

Since 2010, the social media giant Facebook has been trying to develop a better search engine. With the advantages brought by massive social information resources, it has become the world's second largest search engine after Google, and has obtained substantial search advertising revenue. And Google isn't sitting on its hands. The company struggled to launch a social network to challenge Facebook until it abandoned the idea five years ago.

Now, Apple is getting ready to try out the search service. The smartphone maker is crawling more of the web to build search indexes, putting some of its search results in front of iPhone users and hiring engineers to speed up the long and expensive effort.

The prospect of a return of the internet search wars raises an interesting question: Why hasn’t there been more competition between the biggest tech companies in the core markets that have defined them? And can regulators nudge them into more open rivalry?

The answer to the first question is that the leading consumer tech companies have been able to become some of the world’s most valuable concerns without needing to tread on each other’s toes too much. Another reason is that frontal attacks are expensive and often ends in failure. Microsoft, for example, invested billions of dollars in search and smartphones, but eventually gave them up. Beating an entrenched rival in tech by fighting on its home turf is usually a losing proposition.