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Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

Success hides failure...every company does some things right and some things wrong, but when things are going well it can be very hard to get anyone to acknowledge the wrong things. People can always point to the profits and use that as evidence for staying the course, even on internal issues that don't directly relate to P&L.

IMO this is what ultimately kills successful companies- once they've conquered their market (whatever they see their market as being), it's all too easy to take success for granted and get too focused on internal politics. The absence of fierce external competition is the ultimate test of a company's internal culture.

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Interestingly, this problem of decadence and decay scales to countries, royal dynasties, empires, etc. We don't yet have any companies so large that their period of decline has been able to last for centuries, but it's theoretically possible.

I don't think Oracle and IBM will be around in 2050, but I wouldn't have thought they'd be around now in 2005, so my perception is probably off.

Hard to say if there are companies whose decline lasted over a century, but there are definitely some who are close. Consider the East India Company which was established in 1600 and lasted until the late 1800s. In my native Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company was granted a charter in 1670 and at one point owned half the country. It has been struggling for very nearly 100 years and I think you could say that it has been on a downturn for at least 150 years.

I don't believe the proper narrative about how the decline of the Roman empire was due to decadence. I believe it was a victim of its own success. Roman ideas, organization, and commerce spread out to the surrounding kingdoms, eventually each region developed a polity progressively capable of challenging Rome. It didn't happen all at once, and if you look at it in the micro, it does look like a decline, but in the macro, the so-called decline of the Roman empire was a story of progress.

You can generalize this. Isolate the idea that the organization was built on, then see what happened to it. Usually, you'll see that the 'killer app' that gave them the ability to rise to the top created a new world in which everyone has that ability to exercise it. If you don't come up with a new one, you'll eventually lose your privileged position.

There's nothing wrong with this at all. We just are wired to want success so we go looking for personal failures rather than thinking bigger.

Except you don't see this in the Roman Empire. If anything, the economic sophistication of their european opponents steadily declined, making war a more appealing option than trade for them.

And in warfare itself, with the exception of the Sassanids and the civil wars, the Romans did not face armies that had adapted their tactics. Rather, the longstanding issue of inferior roman cavalry in both quantitative and qualitative terms and the decline in quality of their infantry legions/ reliance on auxiliaries made them far more vulnerable to concentrations of heavy cavalry, horse archers, and non-pitched battles. For a variety of factors the averagesquality of western Roman armament and training consistently declined from about 200 AD on, which is the opposite of what you're saying.

Decadence is a politically loaded and over-determined word and there are myriad factors contributing to the fall of the Roman empire in the west, but the thesis that the germanic, central asian and gaulic tribes had successfully adopted Roman administrative and logistical forms has no historical basis. I get that it's supposed to be a cute metaphor for tech companies and market-wide adoption of an innovation, but if a metaphor is advancing a novel thesis that's empirically false, it's not a good metaphor.

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