Tech Giants Rethink the Businesses That Made Them Big

Tech giants have long tinkered with ways to grow outside the core businesses they dominate. Now those efforts are becoming urgent. A confluence of forces is behind Big Tech’s business-model ferment. Blowback over privacy abuses and misinformation threatens ad-driven strategies at Facebook and Google built on harvesting people’s information and maximizing the time they spend glued to the internet. The smartphone, which underpinned so much of the tech industry’s boom over the past decade, is maturing, with incremental innovation and flagging sales. And the law of large numbers, combined with the tech industry’s history of upstarts leapfrogging incumbents on innovation, compels executives to seek out new places to disrupt, lest they themselves be disrupted.