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With logic like that it's remarkable that our markets aren't dominated by 50, 100, 200, even 500 year old goliaths. "They're big! They'll be here forever and o

With logic like that it's remarkable that our markets aren't dominated by 50, 100, 200, even 500 year old goliaths. "They're big! They'll be here forever and only get bigger!"

adventured 10y ago
I never said or implied such a thing, you're exaggerating. What I said, is that it's the exception for a tech juggernaut to 'get eaten for lunch.' And that is indeed a fact. Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell, Cisco, Google, Amazon, IBM, Texas Instruments, SAP, EMC, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple Where's the lunch eating? Where's the wasteland of destruction of tech titans? Most of those are now old companies, some are very old. Now name a dozen plus companies of comparable sizes in terms of sales that have actually been destroyed in the last 30 years. It is thus that it's the exception, exactly as I said.
- aurelianito 10y ago
  DEC, Silicon Graphics, Sun, Gateway just as I remember now.
  - nl 10y ago
    DEC and Sun are both in the list above (as HP and Oracle). This isn't just a technical point - I suppose it isn't out of the question for a mega-merger/buyout of something like Facebook and Microsoft could occur.
    - aurelianito 10y ago
      Nokia too. Or you will also claim it to be a part of Microsoft? All the companies I listed do not exist now. Some were bought. They were bought because they failed, like Yahoo! Are you going to claim that Yahoo! still exists as part of Verizon? They did not merge. They were bought for peanuts.
      - sho_hn 10y ago
        > All the companies I listed do not exist now. Nokia has 114000 employees (almost twice of 2014 after buying Alcatel-Lucent: Nokia owns Bell Labs now) and $20b+ of revenue. It's amusing how people in the HN bubble tend to think Nokia was bought by MS and closed.
      - nl 10y ago
        They did not merge. They were bought for peanuts. You are misremembering. "Digital was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. Digital was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. As of 2007 some of Digital's product lines were still produced under the HP name."[1] The Sun purchase wasn't as big, true. But they had multiple bidders, and sold for $5.6B: "In late 2008, Sun was approached by IBM to discuss a possible merger.[4] At about the same time, Sun also began discussions with another company, widely rumored but unconfirmed to be Hewlett Packard, about a potential acquisition. By March 2009, talks had stalled between Sun and both IBM and the other potential suitor. On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle Corporation announced that they had entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle would acquire Sun for $9.50 a share in cash. Net of Sun's cash and debt, this amounted to a $5.6 billion offer from Oracle"[2] These are both excellent of examples of companies that one might argue "failed" in the market place, but were still valuable years after their peak in the market. That is exactly what adventured is saying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle
  - dgacmu 10y ago
    Cray. Radio shack/Tandy. KSR. MasPar. Thinking Machines. Sinclair. It's easy to accidentally have survivorship bias.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bllguo 10y ago
Not believing that "a company of FB's size will implode in 10 years" doesn't imply belief in "a company of FB's size will never implode."
gregshap 10y ago
But the parent didn't say they can't go down, just that they won't implode within a decade of today. If IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco are dying it's a multi decade process. The dot-com companies that imploded 15 years ago were mostly losing money from day one.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  Fair enough. I'm perhaps overly cynical when I see this much optimism.
  - adventured 10y ago
    Optimism? It's simple extrapolation and a quick historical reference on how equivalently massive companies hold up over the near-term (5-10 years). I wasn't offering up an optimistic scenario. In just three years they'll very likely hit $13 to $15 billion in annual profit or so (it'll be $8.5 to $9 billion in the next 4 quarters alone), and have $50+ billion in cash. What is inbound in the next three years that will hammer down upon a network carrying 1.7 billion users, that is still expanding and has no presently known threat to it, while possessing such extreme financial resources? Absolutely nothing, that's what. No threat other than perhaps Snapchat could get enough scale in that time to be listed as a potential threat to them in the next three years. Five years: $70 billion in cash, conservatively. $16 to $20 billion in annual profit, assuming a significant slowdown in their ad growth. Then from the 5 to 10 year span, what's going to come flying in that is going to steal their $70 to $100 billion in cash? Or make their business disappear in just a few years. I can't name any other example of such a wild outcome happening, outside of maybe AOL, and they never had the financial muscle or scale that Facebook already commands.
    - ethanbond 10y ago
      I mean that I took a cynical read e.g. skimmed that you were specifically talking about the near term.
    - joosters 10y ago
      It's simple extrapolation That's the problem though. There's a good reason why just about every financial prospectus includes the phrase "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". Then from the 5 to 10 year span, what's going to come flying in that is going to steal their $70 to $100 billion in cash? Why are you so confident that you can predict everything that might happen in the next 5 to 10 years?
et-al 10y ago
I think it's because a lot of those giants were commodities and could easily be replaced. Companies have learned the impact of branding, and they're now tied into our identities. So the social aspect keeps companies relevant and in power. With regards to Facebook, when I'm looking over people's shoulders, what are they doing? Checking out their Facebook timeline, or Instagram, (or playing Pokemon Go for the time being). To unseat Facebook, Facebook would need to really betray the public's trust, and a competitor would have to provide an equally comprehensive service (and helpful migration tools). Google Plus's timing was poor and seemed to share everything with the pubic. ello had good timing, but they were invite-based and the minimal interface seemed like it lacked features. Facebook is the AOL of the present, but unlike AOL they've managed to adapt (or acquire) to users' changing mediums for socializing.
murbard2 10y ago
Standard oil, founded 1870, is worth well over $600 if you count the companies it was broken into (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amocco before its purchase...) Cargill, founded 1865, makes over $120B of revenue annually. (That's half of Apple, but two Google). Probably worth around $300B GE, founded 1892, $286B IBM, founded 1911, $154B JP Morgan & Morgan Stanley, both descendents of 1854's Peabody, Morgan & co: $300B Ford, founded 1903, $50B
- nostrademons 10y ago
  The Erie Railroad [1], founded 1832, bankrupt in 1859, 1878, 1893, 1938, and 1976, now largely in disrepair. Woolworths [2], founded 1878, the first department store in the country, once owned the tallest building in the world. Started losing market share to Sears & catalog retailers in the 1930s, defunct in 1997. Sears was itself eclipsed by WalMart, which is on the verge of being eclipsed by Amazon. International Mercantile Marine [3], owners of the Titanic, once monopolized shipping so thoroughly that the British government paid to keep Cunard (its only competitor) alive. Bankrupt in 1916, sold White Star Lines in 1926 to a company that collapsed in 1934, lost 2/3 of its fleet in the 5 years between 1930-1935, acquired in 1931, divested all passenger vessels by 1968, bankrupt in 1986. TWA [4], founded via merger in 1930, almost went bankrupt in 1931, dissolved by act of Congress in 1934 but the brand was maintained by one of the daughter companies, purchased by Hughes in 1938, forced (by the government) to be sold in 1966, purchased by Icahn in 1985, bankrupt 1992, bankrupt 1995, final bankruptcy 2001. There's a pretty massive survivorship bias when looking only at companies you've heard of, and even if they've survived in name for a century, it's not unusual for them to have periodic bankruptcies every 10-20 years that wipe out the shareholders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Railroad [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mercantile_Marine_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mercantile_Marin.... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines
  - murbard2 10y ago
    Agreed, I was just trying to point out that it's not uncommon for very old companies to still be giants in the economy. Even older companies I forgot to include: Citigroup, the NYSE.
zjaffee 10y ago
There are many companies over a 100 years old who are still in the fortune 500, many of them have very strong market cap's. Look at GE, or JP Morgan. http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/oldest-companies-fortune-500/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/oldest-companies-fortune-500/ It's just the case that old companies aren't generally coming out of nowhere and all of a sudden turning everything around, part of the reason what apple has done over the past 10 or so years so impressive.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  I didn't say there aren't any. I said that the markets aren't dominated by them, i.e. there is obviously such a thing as a large company declining, and it is obviously a common enough thing for there to not to be thousands of gigantic century-old companies among us. It's plainly absurd to say "a company is big therefore it will grow." In my reading of the original comment I ignored the caveat of the 5-10 year timeframe. It's true that a gigantic company can almost definitely decline for 5-10 years without disappearing. It's not true that that means it will grow for those 5-10 years instead.

With logic like that it's remarkable that our markets aren't dominated by 50, 100, 200, even 500 year old goliaths. "They're big! They'll be here forever and only get bigger!"

adventured 10y ago

I never said or implied such a thing, you're exaggerating. What I said, is that it's the exception for a tech juggernaut to 'get eaten for lunch.' And that is indeed a fact. Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell, Cisco, Google, Amazon, IBM, Texas Instruments, SAP, EMC, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple Where's the lunch eating? Where's the wasteland of destruction of tech titans? Most of those are now old companies, some are very old. Now name a dozen plus companies of comparable sizes in terms of sales that have actually been destroyed in the last 30 years. It is thus that it's the exception, exactly as I said.

aurelianito 10y ago
DEC, Silicon Graphics, Sun, Gateway just as I remember now.
- nl 10y ago
  DEC and Sun are both in the list above (as HP and Oracle). This isn't just a technical point - I suppose it isn't out of the question for a mega-merger/buyout of something like Facebook and Microsoft could occur.
  - aurelianito 10y ago
    Nokia too. Or you will also claim it to be a part of Microsoft? All the companies I listed do not exist now. Some were bought. They were bought because they failed, like Yahoo! Are you going to claim that Yahoo! still exists as part of Verizon? They did not merge. They were bought for peanuts.
    - sho_hn 10y ago
      > All the companies I listed do not exist now. Nokia has 114000 employees (almost twice of 2014 after buying Alcatel-Lucent: Nokia owns Bell Labs now) and $20b+ of revenue. It's amusing how people in the HN bubble tend to think Nokia was bought by MS and closed.
    - nl 10y ago
      They did not merge. They were bought for peanuts. You are misremembering. "Digital was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. Digital was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. As of 2007 some of Digital's product lines were still produced under the HP name."[1] The Sun purchase wasn't as big, true. But they had multiple bidders, and sold for $5.6B: "In late 2008, Sun was approached by IBM to discuss a possible merger.[4] At about the same time, Sun also began discussions with another company, widely rumored but unconfirmed to be Hewlett Packard, about a potential acquisition. By March 2009, talks had stalled between Sun and both IBM and the other potential suitor. On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle Corporation announced that they had entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle would acquire Sun for $9.50 a share in cash. Net of Sun's cash and debt, this amounted to a $5.6 billion offer from Oracle"[2] These are both excellent of examples of companies that one might argue "failed" in the market place, but were still valuable years after their peak in the market. That is exactly what adventured is saying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle
- dgacmu 10y ago
  Cray. Radio shack/Tandy. KSR. MasPar. Thinking Machines. Sinclair. It's easy to accidentally have survivorship bias.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

bllguo 10y ago

Not believing that "a company of FB's size will implode in 10 years" doesn't imply belief in "a company of FB's size will never implode."

gregshap 10y ago

But the parent didn't say they can't go down, just that they won't implode within a decade of today. If IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco are dying it's a multi decade process. The dot-com companies that imploded 15 years ago were mostly losing money from day one.

ethanbond 10y ago
Fair enough. I'm perhaps overly cynical when I see this much optimism.
- adventured 10y ago
  Optimism? It's simple extrapolation and a quick historical reference on how equivalently massive companies hold up over the near-term (5-10 years). I wasn't offering up an optimistic scenario. In just three years they'll very likely hit $13 to $15 billion in annual profit or so (it'll be $8.5 to $9 billion in the next 4 quarters alone), and have $50+ billion in cash. What is inbound in the next three years that will hammer down upon a network carrying 1.7 billion users, that is still expanding and has no presently known threat to it, while possessing such extreme financial resources? Absolutely nothing, that's what. No threat other than perhaps Snapchat could get enough scale in that time to be listed as a potential threat to them in the next three years. Five years: $70 billion in cash, conservatively. $16 to $20 billion in annual profit, assuming a significant slowdown in their ad growth. Then from the 5 to 10 year span, what's going to come flying in that is going to steal their $70 to $100 billion in cash? Or make their business disappear in just a few years. I can't name any other example of such a wild outcome happening, outside of maybe AOL, and they never had the financial muscle or scale that Facebook already commands.
  - ethanbond 10y ago
    I mean that I took a cynical read e.g. skimmed that you were specifically talking about the near term.
  - joosters 10y ago
    It's simple extrapolation That's the problem though. There's a good reason why just about every financial prospectus includes the phrase "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". Then from the 5 to 10 year span, what's going to come flying in that is going to steal their $70 to $100 billion in cash? Why are you so confident that you can predict everything that might happen in the next 5 to 10 years?

et-al 10y ago

I think it's because a lot of those giants were commodities and could easily be replaced. Companies have learned the impact of branding, and they're now tied into our identities. So the social aspect keeps companies relevant and in power. With regards to Facebook, when I'm looking over people's shoulders, what are they doing? Checking out their Facebook timeline, or Instagram, (or playing Pokemon Go for the time being). To unseat Facebook, Facebook would need to really betray the public's trust, and a competitor would have to provide an equally comprehensive service (and helpful migration tools). Google Plus's timing was poor and seemed to share everything with the pubic. ello had good timing, but they were invite-based and the minimal interface seemed like it lacked features. Facebook is the AOL of the present, but unlike AOL they've managed to adapt (or acquire) to users' changing mediums for socializing.

murbard2 10y ago

Standard oil, founded 1870, is worth well over $600 if you count the companies it was broken into (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amocco before its purchase...) Cargill, founded 1865, makes over $120B of revenue annually. (That's half of Apple, but two Google). Probably worth around $300B GE, founded 1892, $286B IBM, founded 1911, $154B JP Morgan & Morgan Stanley, both descendents of 1854's Peabody, Morgan & co: $300B Ford, founded 1903, $50B

nostrademons 10y ago
The Erie Railroad [1], founded 1832, bankrupt in 1859, 1878, 1893, 1938, and 1976, now largely in disrepair. Woolworths [2], founded 1878, the first department store in the country, once owned the tallest building in the world. Started losing market share to Sears & catalog retailers in the 1930s, defunct in 1997. Sears was itself eclipsed by WalMart, which is on the verge of being eclipsed by Amazon. International Mercantile Marine [3], owners of the Titanic, once monopolized shipping so thoroughly that the British government paid to keep Cunard (its only competitor) alive. Bankrupt in 1916, sold White Star Lines in 1926 to a company that collapsed in 1934, lost 2/3 of its fleet in the 5 years between 1930-1935, acquired in 1931, divested all passenger vessels by 1968, bankrupt in 1986. TWA [4], founded via merger in 1930, almost went bankrupt in 1931, dissolved by act of Congress in 1934 but the brand was maintained by one of the daughter companies, purchased by Hughes in 1938, forced (by the government) to be sold in 1966, purchased by Icahn in 1985, bankrupt 1992, bankrupt 1995, final bankruptcy 2001. There's a pretty massive survivorship bias when looking only at companies you've heard of, and even if they've survived in name for a century, it's not unusual for them to have periodic bankruptcies every 10-20 years that wipe out the shareholders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Railroad [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mercantile_Marine_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mercantile_Marin.... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines
- murbard2 10y ago
  Agreed, I was just trying to point out that it's not uncommon for very old companies to still be giants in the economy. Even older companies I forgot to include: Citigroup, the NYSE.

zjaffee 10y ago

There are many companies over a 100 years old who are still in the fortune 500, many of them have very strong market cap's. Look at GE, or JP Morgan. http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/oldest-companies-fortune-500/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/oldest-companies-fortune-500/ It's just the case that old companies aren't generally coming out of nowhere and all of a sudden turning everything around, part of the reason what apple has done over the past 10 or so years so impressive.

ethanbond 10y ago
I didn't say there aren't any. I said that the markets aren't dominated by them, i.e. there is obviously such a thing as a large company declining, and it is obviously a common enough thing for there to not to be thousands of gigantic century-old companies among us. It's plainly absurd to say "a company is big therefore it will grow." In my reading of the original comment I ignored the caveat of the 5-10 year timeframe. It's true that a gigantic company can almost definitely decline for 5-10 years without disappearing. It's not true that that means it will grow for those 5-10 years instead.