I'm more interested in whether reality pays heed to business plans... did Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, HP, Ford, Bell, Edison have business plans? Is t

I'm more interested in whether reality pays heed to business plans... did Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, HP, Ford, Bell, Edison have business plans? Is there a correlation? Or maybe an inverse one? The article seems to be saying that a "business plan" can help you see what the competitive landscape is at the moment. So it's not so much a "plan" for the future, but a picture of reality now. It's similar to how I've started solving coding problems: to write down what the things are. This is not itself the solution, but it helps me to see clearly by removing so many factors, and then I can come up with a solution. I think it has a similar basis to what Fred Brooks said about complexity being easier to understand when represented as tables (objects, structs) than as flowcharts (code).