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Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

I'm even struggling to come up with counter examples where a major established company is able to successfully pivot when the business model that brought them success is no long as viable as it once was. Maybe IBM counts in that they still exist, although I'd argue they aren't nearly the omnipresent force they were back in the day. You could also count widely diversified companies, but I probably wouldn't because they never really have to try to pivot the entire business.

As you said, finding a balance is hard and maybe not truly possible.

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Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.

Apple: suffered from Windows PC competition in the 1990s but came roaring back under Steve Jobs. They doubled down on high-quality design, user experience, and vertical integration, and even switched from PowerPC to x86 and ARM, and from classic macOS to BSD-based OS X.

HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.

HP(E) managed to survive but I wouldn’t say they’re a roaring success.

They went from 300k employees to a small fraction. They went from designing graphics cards in-house to practically rebranding white box servers.

(Yes, they still make their own servers, too much of the design and manufacturing work being done by outside firms).

They’ve also thrown away a mind boggling amount of talent and institutional knowledge of storage and networking.

Intel famously pivoted from memory. Maybe it’ll still get to where Pat wanted it to go as a foundry in its most recent pivot attempt, unclear yet.

It helped that they pivoted into a brand new and rapidly growing market that they had a big hand in creating. That's not so much the case for retail.

Nintendo and Netflix are the only examples I’ve got.

Google is attempting to do this as we speak

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