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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an old myth that is no longer relevant. Sure, it might happen, but many companies now fully understand "the disruption game" and know how to adjust, primarily through acquisitions. The only way to break this is with more muscular antitrust, which (at least for now) seems to be happening.

For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town. Furthermore, dominant companies actually rarely get disrupted in the sense that someone comes along to take their business, it's that new markets open up that make the old business obsolete. But IBM is still the leader in mainframes, Microsoft still has dominance for desktop operating systems, Google is still dominant in search despite what feels like weekly articles about how search quality has gone down.

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I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)

Elsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite collection of essays on software development. The last post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias" http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234

    I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: 
    a stack of printouts, tall as any man, 
    that in decaying boxes had been stowed. 
    Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. 
    Abandoned in the blackness to erode, 
    what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. 
    The language is unused in this late year. 
    The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. 
    Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, 
    a line of code and then these words appear: 
    
    # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE 
    
    The code beside persisting to the last—
    as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
    while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...

First time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common confusion, mined by English highschool teachers

https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&...

Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club

This should be framed in the the office or every CEO. Although the point of the poem is the inevitability - maybe a good reminder nonetheless.

I like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK campus...

Memento mori but for businesses.

One of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in high school we could memorize poems and recite them to our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one of them.

> Microsoft is famously still doing quite well

IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.

Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.

1: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GE:NYSE?window=MAX

2: https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

> IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.

Literally, what are you talking about? IBM and GE have both been shrinking for YEARS now. Even the graph you linked above shows GE's stock where it was in 1997. Just compare either GE or IBM to https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX

> For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town.

There was a period about 10-12 years ago when Microsoft was basically left for dead

Microsoft is surprisingly hard to kill. They do a little of everything, and internally act much less like one company and more like a conglomerate. This means there is more politics than needed, but also that the company can survive some pretty massive changes. Microsoft isn't perfect, but it can probably survive even if they lost their top 3 revenue generators, which I'm not sure would be true for Google or Amazon...

Azure launched 13 years ago in 2010. Before that, Microsoft had Windows and Office.

for real, everyone was saying microsoft was the new ibm

I think in a way, MSFT is only doing fine because all the alternatives are doing awful. Google, Apple, Amazon, they're all not exactly at the top of their game. Also MSFT is in a huge dev. marketing campaign phase, so we as dev probably are exposed a lot more to their charm offensive than the rest of the population. Our perspective might be biased.

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