The GAFAM Empire
Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, the world witnessed the birth and affirmation of so-called Big Tech—the five largest companies that operate in the field of information technology, which are also known today as ‘GAFAM’ (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). In the roughly fifty years since then, these companies have been able to build empires of intellectual property of technologies and systems—primarily through acquisitions of other companies both small and large, which allowed them to centre technological innovations within their walls. The GAFAM Empire, a project developed by DensityDesign Lab and Tactical Tech, collects the information of more than 1,000 acquisitions made by these companies, in order to look back at the history of the industry through the limited data publicly available on the web. The information visualizes a landscape of acquisitions to identify common interests, which are then broken down into a deep analysis of GAFAM’s history. The project visualizes the data in different shapes and through different focus points, allowing the reader to understand a complex system of relationships that is constantly evolving and that is redefining the concepts of competition and monopoly.