[–] cyberax 2 days ago
[–] WalterBright 2 days ago
I remember a comment in the tech news from 25 years ago - "nobody is afraid of Microsoft anymore".
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
And you actually are failing to see what I'm trying to say. IBM is a GREAT example of my point. They pivoted from a company that makes keyboards and PCs to a company that makes custom solutions with specialized hardware and software.
This sort of corporate flexibility used to be extremely rare, and that's why you have so many examples of companies that just withered away. And this corporate stagnation was the only real limiting factor of corporate growth.
It's now gone. Companies now have much higher upper limit of complexity. It's still a competition, so it's not like every company is going to become "The Corporation" from dystopias. But there's no inherent limiter that prevents it anymore.
So let's invert your argument and try to find counterexamples.
Google is already close to 30 years old. It's not a new company. Microsoft is more than 50 years old! Do you have examples of large pre-computer-era companies that were at least this old and yet were able to successfully enter and expand in new markets? And not just by buying a stake in some company but incorporating new products into the parent company.
My fear is that AI will make that even more scalable, enabling even larger companies.