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Comment by RandomOpinion | Hacker News Reader

It was inevitable. These monopolies / near-monopolies seem to follow a pattern:

-IBM was at its peak in the '80s before losing its direction and beginning layoffs and a long slow collapse, reducing it to its current state as a shadow of its former self.

-Microsoft was at its peak in the '90s before losing its direction and is now starting its collapse with major layoffs a couple of years ago.

-Google was at its peak in the '00s and is starting to lose its direction.

-Amazon is at its peak now in the '10s.

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Where do you get the idea that Google peaked in the '00s? Their net income has been rising dramatically every year (2015 more than doubled 2009):

http://www.statista.com/statistics/266472/googles-net-income...

I think people are conflating "a company at its peak" with "shiny new company that is the center of media hype", which are completely different things.

I don't know what the original poster meant, but I may (I'm not sure I would) argue that he may mean things other than simple income/profit. Such things as core competencies/competitiveness/managerial and employee talent and motivation/corporate "cohesiveness"/ability to create successful products/other, maybe more difficult to measure criteria and so forth.

I wouldn't say all (or even most) of the above applies to Google, but I do believe that for large corporate systems in general, these sorts of things become a major issue when you have half a million employees and hundreds of subsidiaries/divisions.

Just trying to make things clearer.

Could you show some data? For example, if you're talking about workplace happiness, Google is still ranked #1 company to work for:

http://fortune.com/best-companies/google-alphabet-1/

Disclaimer: I do not work for Google.

Income should keep rising after the company "peaks". By the time income actually stops rising, executives will have started pooping masonry, and the collapse will have to be acknowledged by everyone since it will be officially visible to everyone.

Microsoft's income kept rising steadily through the '00s too and look at where they are.

I'd trade places with Microsoft.

Earning $16.7 billion on $85.3 billion in the 12 months to June 2016 sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Most CEOs will do anything to trade places with Microsoft.

Geoffrey West, of the Santa Fe Institute, has plotted company lifespans based on growth trajectories. Short-and-sweet: the faster and shorter the rise, the faster the fall. Longer and slower trajectories tend to be more stable.

http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...

https://www.edge.org/conversation/geoffrey_west-why-cities-k...

http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/Documents/Publications/West&B...

You're very obviously wrong on Amazon. They have at least 10 to 15 more years of significant growth before peaking. They're still growing near 20%. Their retail business is still eating the competition (total US retail sales are hardly growing). AWS is still growing rapidly and spitting off perpetually greater sums of operating income (that business is nowhere near peak and won't be for a long time). It's very likely Amazon's sales will reach several hundred billion dollars per year over time, just in retail alone. Amazon has a very decent shot of becoming at least 2/3 the size of Walmart in terms of sales.

Demand for ads, hardware, software and internet services have been increasing over time as more people are introduced to computers and the intrawebs. If all these companies have peaked, who is capturing the ever increasing demand?

Whats coming post Amazon? Alibaba?

Add Cisco to that list.

Last I checked the average corporate lifespan in the US is 25 years, so these numbers don't seem abnormal to me. Indeed it is amazing that IBM is even still around.

I find it more peculiar that people think companies "must" (or even should) have long-term survival as a goal.

I've wanted to sit down for a while now and chart out company lifespans over the past 100 years. I could very well be wrong, but I have a feeling that just as technology/product life cycles are getting shorter, so too are the life cycles of companies.

note: There are of course many aspects that would make this a bit of a difficult thing to study, mergers and acquisitions being just one for instance, and at least for small businesses, "birth" and especially "death" dates are incredibly hard to pin down. But still something I've been interested in for a while.

I'm eagerly waiting for your "Show HN". :)

By the way, the hardest part IMO would not be accounting for mergers/acquisitions etc., but accounting for the survivorship bias of just forgetting about the companies that were once big but which we don't even remember anymore.

Buffet tries to instill that message but maybe that's the polar opposite. He says build a companythat will last a lifetime.

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