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I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fa

I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fall victim to the same fate. Those dinosaurs largely saw their maturation before the rise of Internet, and as such still have a lot of pre-Internet culture in them, especially in the C-suite. Google (largely) doesn't have that. And they, along with the rest of the FAANG companies, just deal with menacing upstarts by buying them. They're public, they're starting to become too massive, but no one cares as long as they continue providing their core free services.

hliyan 6y ago
My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.