> This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Wind

> This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on. Sure, but for every unexpected floundering there are many more predictions of failure that never occurred. I'm not sure how unexpected failures in general give any insight beyond that they exist.