>The conglomerate was supposed to be dead, a relic of a bygone of era of corporate America.
That's not even close to being true. How does someone get a job on a supposedly reputable newspaper writing such daft shit?
That's not even close to being true. How does someone get a job on a supposedly reputable newspaper writing such daft shit?
Investors, we have been repeatedly told, want smaller, nimbler, more focused companies."
Who's we? If, by investors, they mean a fairly specific subset of investors, namely Venture Capitalists* and Angel Investors, then yes.
But otherwise, no. People aren't bailing out of established conglomerates. Not that I'm aware of.
Seems like a mix of investors, reporters, and CEOs.
I retract my previous statement and substitute it with something more like:
The discount investors apply to conglomerates is linked to perceived lower risk.
So while it might not be accurate to say investors want smaller, nimbler, more focused companies without specifying which investors, it can be accurate to say something like investors looking for a higher rate of return (which implies greater risk) want smaller, nimbler, more focused companies.
But I don't think that's what the conglomerate discount is, which I believe says that the components of a conglomerate are worth more than the conglomerate itself. More precisely, "Conglomerate discount is calculated by adding an estimation of the intrinsic value of each of the subsidiary companies in a conglomerate and subtracting the conglomerate's market capitalization from that value." [1]
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.asp...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conglomerate&y...
The concept is an old one, dating to the late 19th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the new phenomenon was the "multinational corporation".
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=multinational%...
Also, I'm wary of using n-grams to infer anything about the relevance of concept because there are such things as intellectual fads, and some expressions might suddenly hit public consciousness and later fade away without the idea it referred to ever becoming any less relevant. MacLuhan's media theory, for instance, became an intellectual fad in the 1970s and MacLuhan hit celebrity status. Later on, it faded away, but I don't think what he was describing became any less relevant. This kind of stuff is noticeable to anyone, though they might be hard pressed for examples: just try and notice how the buzzwords in your field changed over time.
The expression "multinational corporation", as well as the word "globalization", were also fads of the 1970s too. At the time, they were more like academic fads: researchers started taking notice of these things and suddenly they became "a thing" among academics as it was a frontier research topic. Later on they hit public massively, probably peaking around the late 1990s and early 2000s with the 1999 Seattle riots, the FTAA debates and just the overall shift towards massive multilateral agreements coupled with shrinking governments. Nowadays neither of the two is as "in" as it was back them either in political or academic debate, but the concepts themselves aren't any less relevant. Or at least that's my two cents on the whole issue.
There's a lot of invective in this HN thread that is directly addressed (Berkshire-Hathaway, etc.) within the article itself. This suggests things.
I'm well aware that ngrams aren't absolute proof and that language itself changes (quite particularly in business and finance). But it is a datapoint to be considered. Answering it from ignorance isn't a particularly strong counter.