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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Let's pretend the suggestions of the author were adopted by Apple in 1995. They stopped entering new markets. They have a product portfolio that generates $11B ($30B today). That portfolio includes some real winners, like the Pippin, a webtv competitor. (WebTV--another company that clearly didn't need to enter new markets because they're doing fantastic today.)

Does anyone really believe this company is viable in 2024? In this scenario, Apple is dead.

The author is free to change his mind about what product he wants over time... but there's something wrong with a company that changes products over time? Companies must be free to adapt to the changing preferences of customers. The alternative is corporate death.

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Growing and adapting are two different concepts.

Adapting is necessary for any company to survive, growing not necessarily.

I'm not sure. I'm a big plant guy and when I think about how plants adapt to new environments it's all about growth. Movement to better soil, water, or light is achieved by growing to a new location and then abandoning the old stems/leaves/etc. A plant that can't grow is about to be toast - these often bloom in a last-ditch effort to continue their genes through new plants (that will have to grow) elsewhere. It's very hard, or even impossible, to maintain a static ecosystem. Plant parts age or get mechanically damaged - the only way to replace them is growing new ones.

It's obviously not a perfect analogy. But in complex natural systems stability without growth is rare.

In this metaphor growth would indeed be growth, and adaptation would be evolution.

And for the record: trees and plants mostly stop growing if you put them in a pot with limited space.

Growing is the external sign that the company is successfully adapting.

What?

Growth is new business, its evolving old ones. If you don't know whats going to work you try more than one thing. Growth is the measure of adaptation.

Corporate death is infinitely preferable to Corporate immortality

Maybe for you and even me. But not for the owners and workers of said company. If you were 42 years old, with 3 children to feed would you not mind if your company was dying and suddenly you had to start brushing up your resume, applying for new jobs which you don't even know if will be as good as what you have now?

What I mean is, it's absurd to expect companies not to behave the way they have always did.

Your definition of “always” might be different than mine

There was a time not long ago and for the majority of human life that the modern concept of a equity based corporation with distinct split between owners and labor didn’t exist

So I’m not sure if always is accurate grounding or the base rate that should be compared against

I think a lot of how companies behave is defined by how they are constructed in law. For example, limited liability allows shareholders of companies to to be shielded from the consequences of "externalities" that their companies cause, which drastically changes their risk landscape compared to a counterfactual world where people were still legally responsible for their actions even when trying to make money

Even in this counterfactual world, and likely EVERY counterfactual world, people with lots of money (which equates with power) will always develop a system that will shield them from accountability. Any system like this is self-reinforcing because a few people with more money will always have a greater influence on 'the system' than the larger number of people with less money.

It's inevitable that people with power will use that power to their advantage. But the degree and the ways in which this is possible permit a vast spectrum of degrees, and adjusting this is a feasible problem of mechanism design. Limited liability in its present form is not an inevitability

What happened to the ice delivery workers?

Those who payed attention and had been keeping their options open went on to other jobs.

I don’t think “job stability” is ever really a thing in a changing world, more of a fantasy, and those who invest everything in it are really investing in their eventual discomfort.

Many small companies and businesses don't have growth as their primary mandate but are moreso vehicles to facilitate the exchange of labor and money between their current staff and their customers.

The author referred to a specific problem: the company changing their business strategy not because they have a competitor, not because business is crashing (these were the problems Apple was facing in ~1995), but because they must grow even though that entails making their products worse and invoking negative externalities.

Customers don't necessarily want a successful product to change. Much of that desire for change is engineered via marketing so that there is an opportunity for growth.

> Does anyone really believe this company is viable in 2024? In this scenario, Apple is dead.

Death is not a "couldn't hack it" outcome. Death is an evolved and persistently retained pattern in all living systems that have arrived here to share spacetime with us (the exceptions that are sustainable are vanishingly small, and those unsustainable are synonymous with approaching-death, aka cancer)

Death is adaptive to systems. With very few exceptions, all living things DIE. We've been selected to DIE. Things that don't die, kill their ecology. They are terrible neighbors, and so are selected for extinction.

So your "would apple survive" question feels like it's missing the point.

All agents must eventually die for the larger performance to thrive. But no actor* will ever choose that, the system does. (Governments often plays this role in the noosphere, as a corporation won't.)

*Humans seem different in that we can model a system, and think like systems. We are an actor, flirting with being a system. I'm open to the fact that we can maybe decide to choose death, even when we have put other options on the table ("defeating death"). So far as a collective of supposedly smart agents, we're kinda failing to realize the adaptive nature of death, and are mostly driving for increased longevity.

(All of the above is informed by complexity science or complex systems, if anyone finds the above trains of thought interesting.)

Reflecting on the future intersection of AI and corporate governance, one of my underlying concerns ties directly to the concept of mortality.

Currently, the inevitability of death ensures a natural cycle of change within companies, as departing leaders make way for new visions and ideas. This turnover allows for evolution, adaptation, and sometimes, necessary redirection. However, the integration of AI into these leadership roles introduces the potential for an 'immortal' rigidity.

If AI were to maintain steadfast control, it might anchor organizations to a static set of principles or strategies, lacking the organic, transformative shifts that human mortality inadvertently guarantees.

This challenges us to consider how we might embed adaptability and growth into systems that, by their nature, could become inflexibly eternal.

Such sclerotic are vulnerable to competitors though and can only survive if they are entrenched enough to be able sit out any changes with minimal adaptations, like car makers and the weapons industry.

That is not a reasonable comparison. Apple 1995 was dead because it had products that were not selling and was running out of ideas. The problem then was not growth out of control, but a complete loss of traction.

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