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Comment by goldfishgold | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.

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I was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology.

Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.

Fair enough. 100yr old companies are pretty easy to come up with, 200yr old companies are much harder.

The other day, I saw a sign on a building for a painting supply manufacturer "since 1748": https://www.tollens.com/la-marque/histoire. I found that quite amazing.

You would pretty much have to turn to Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Wow, your choices are interesting.

  * Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years.  It is basically a high tech business at this point.  Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry.  Again: Huge changes.

  * Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf.  Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged?  I doubt it in highly developed countries.

  * Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon.  Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago.  How/Why?  Automation / computers!

Their point wasn’t that innovation doesn’t exist. Obviously things change. Still, both Exonn, Coke and Wells Fargo are still fundamentally in the same business as they were before. That’s not the case of other companies. IBM became big selling punch-card tabulating system. Have you seen a punch card recently?

Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

> Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

IBM absolutely was in the punch card machine making business in that they were absolutely selling punch card machines and not data processing consulting. And no, they are not in the data processing business today. They are clearly a consulting company first with some software development bolted.

They actually pivoted twice from a mostly hardware company to a mostly software one and once again to a mostly service based one.

Wells Fargo is still doing financial services but banking has very different meaning today. Computer is no longer a job title after all.

So sure those brands are 100 years old, but the underlying companies have been restructured several times with major mergers and spin-offs etc. ExxonMobil even did the baby bell thing of splitting off from a single entity only to merge again and again in the coming decades.

I would say that IBM's business has changed less than Wells Fargo's. IBM still supplies number-crunching devices and services to large corporations and government agencies. The technicalities have changed, but the core business is the same. But running a bank under a gold standard is very different from running a bank under a fiat money and fractional reserve regime.

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