They're not all the same - two of those companies - Facebook and Google initially had no clue about funding their companies. MS and Apple sold actual products that people could buy. As startups they did the really really hard work of convincing a bunch of people to open their wallets and pay hard cash for a product. I think this is a far more valuable exercise that attempting to create something that's popular by giving it away for free, and then selling some advertising product/platform/service that has a nebulous value which is often supported by spying/data-mining users. (aka Investor Story time http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm)