Over 4 decades I've watched many unbeatable high-tech juggernauts disappear practically overnight. These will be no different, including the relentless claims of "but it's different this time!" for each one.
1. [2] Apple (1976)
2. [2] Samsung (1969)
3. [4] Amazon.com (1994)
4. [2] Foxconn (1974)
5. [4] Alphabet Inc. (1998)
6. [2] Microsoft (1975)
7. [1] Hitachi (1910)
8. [1] IBM (1911)
9. [3] Huawei (1987)
10. [1] Sony (1946)
11. [1] Panasonic (1918)
12. [3] Dell (1984)
13. [2] Intel (1968)
14. [1] Hewlett Packard (1939)
categories:
[1] old electronics, 70-100 years old companies.
[2] founded few years before or after the invention of microprocessor (1971)
[3] founded at the dawn of the PC era (80s)
[4] founded at the dawn of the internet era (90s)
From each revolution few companies may eventually join the list, but the old rule.
Their consulting and services business sell mostly to Japan. Electronics division is very specialized. Semiconductor processing equipment, test and measurement and so on.
> [...]
> 2. [2] Samsung (1969)
I know, I'm nitpicking here, but I guess you are thinking of Samsung Electronics here, which is just a part of the Samsung Group. Samsung was founded in 1938.
So it is hard to say where those tech giants can be beaten or not unless someone can predict the future. What if there is revolution happens, where PC can be as powerful as the super computer today, that the cloud companies business model and advantage has been invalidated overnight? Don't lose your imagination.
If well managed, large companies stick around for a long time. Can’t see why FB and GOOG won’t be around for at least another 30 years.
Sure, there is SUN, and Sillicon Graphics as an example, but they were badly managed and put all their eggs into one expensive basket and got disrupted.
The only way large companies become truly irrevelant is through:
1) Bad management
2) Ground shifting / seismic shift on the ecosystem or tech. (Think Kodak).
FB has been very proactive in acquiring new trendy companies and in retrospect Instagram’s acquisition was a genius move. (I remember how much talk was at the time at the 1b price for a company with no revenue). Google has been proactive by doing active research, and amazon by doing all kinds of things.
Yahoo and Twitter are classically badly managed companies and while yahoo got sold to irrevelance, I think Twitter is the next one to be truly disrupted.
How about FB? What are they diversifying in?
VR... i don't know about that.
Lots of survivorship bias in this - Most of their contemporaries such as Atari, Tandy, Commodore are all defunct, and the Unix hardware vendors that all became M&A targets.
I would say that given the scale of companies like Amazon in particular, the null hypothesis is more that these companies will exist forever.
Today we are stuck with Google search, tomorrow we will be trapped in off-white Google apartments in Google city, and DuckDuckGo will still only be a search engine.
i think where in the past juggernauts have fallen its usually due to not being wise to megatrends/platform shifts. I'm not saying amzn/fb/googl are immune to these, but they have each in their own way shown a fair amount of nimbleness in the 10+years they have been around, navigating huge shifts in consumer behavior. If they can learn from the past and prevent themselves from ossifying, they will put off their eventual decline for that much longer. I think bezos and zuck have among the best attitudes to change/learning we have ever had in corporate america.
Practically everything on nabla9's list above had to make severe pivots to survive, and many are shadows of their former selves; for many that aren't, I see their demise coming (they've just got so much money from the heyday that the momentum will take time to stop).