1960 "The Fall of Bershire Hathaway" -- the problem is that the textile business has been in decline after WW2, the overseas manufacturers are undercutting on

1960 "The Fall of Bershire Hathaway" -- the problem is that the textile business has been in decline after WW2, the overseas manufacturers are undercutting on price, and Egyptian cotton is more highly coveted than Alabama cotton. (Unforseen: The company stopped dealing with fabrics and became a holding company for investments.) 1980 "The Fall of Microsoft" -- the problem is that 100% of their revenue is programming tools such as MS BASIC and MS COBOL. These are not the high growth areas. There's a new breed of "productivity" software such as Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc spreadsheet introduced last year and WordPerfect word processor introduced this year. Microsoft is in serious trouble. (Unforseen: They saw explosive growth in MS Office and Windows o/s.) 1983 "The Fall of Intel" -- the problem is that they can't compete with cut throat memory prices from Japan. It's a low margin business. (Unforseen: They emphasized CPUs and got out of the RAM business.) 1997 "The Fall of Apple" -- ... we all know this story, yada yada yada (The following quotes were made up but I hope people get the point.) The problem with typical journalists predicting the "fall" of a company is that they base it on publicly known information. They base it on what the company has done in the past. The journalists don't sit in boardroom meetings outlining future plans that are unrelated to their current core revenue generators. The journalists also aren't privy to the secret skunkworks projects in the R&D pipeline. It's understandable that they don't have this information but they almost never make disclaimers of their blind spots which makes their predictions sound more convincing. That's not to say that companies do fail to evolve. Kodak, Myspace, Atari, etc. What's hard to say from the outside looking in is if Facebook is a 1980-Microsoft/1983-Intel or is it Kodak/Atari? I think Zuckerberg and his team are well aware of the precarious and fickle nature of "social networking" and that's why they're exploring other channels such as payments, virtual reality, etc. Maybe they'll even get in on the health care monitoring game as well. If a journalist has some credible educated guesses or grabs an insider's scoop on these unknowns, that's much more interesting than predicting a companies death with incomplete information.