Teaming Up to Take On the Tech Giants

Barry Libert, cofounder of strategy firm AIMatters, had a splash of cold water for fashion.  He said five companies — Amazon, Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft — own every customer in the world.  “The physical world lost a long time ago and in your industry and in every industry,” he said. “They have won. Game over. And we in this room made that happen, we turned over all of ourselves, our complete selves to them.” But in an interactive presentation where Libert asked the audience to stand and greet the people around them — making a little human connection — he also offered a new way forward for an industry that has in many ways been left behind in the economics of the world of big tech.  Libert sketched out the divide in stark terms, noting that as recently as 2006, the physical world was still winning over big tech.  But just five years later, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was admitting that he missed the mobile wave and fell prey to Apple and the iPhone. By 2016, the virtual and data worlds had taken over and now there are companies, such as Amazon, with a market capitalization that exceeds that of the entire

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