4 ms·

I've heard this before but I'm not convinced. Not every big company fails and goes away. Not every company is Yahoo.

• dntrkv 6y ago
  I don't think it necessarily means the whole company will fail, but over time, large companies become more risk-averse which opens up room for smaller, nimble companies to gain market share. Tesla being a great example of this. Hell, Google itself came up this way. There is also another factor that isn't discussed as much and that's when companies become spread too thin. When a large company attempts to compete in every market, it will be increasingly difficult to be competitive in any of them. Yahoo is a great example of this, they spread themselves too thin, they didn't do any one thing better than others, and over time they were overtaken by competitors.
• qshqwudhoquc 6y ago
  This doesn't seem like an argument you can make since A) modern capitalist companies have only been around for 400 or so years B) 'big' companies since then have not lasted more than 200 years at the very high end. There is literally not enough data to make the point you are trying to make. All evidence available, which isn't much, shows big companies are destined to fail if they keep expanding.
  • Nasrudith 6y ago
    It is essentially an incompletely defined argument that goalposts can be set anywhere from absurdly near term (it won't die in the next five seconds and thus is immortal) to the absurdly far (it almost certainly won't survive in a millenia and is thus already dust). Shell has spanned slavery to fossil fuels in commodities sold but the mortality curve shows only very few outliers can survive historic terms, let alone grow over them.