Twenty years or so ago, only Microsoft would have been on that list. It was being hit with lawsuits and Apple was on the other side because it wasn't on the list. The landscape changed and DEC and SUN are gone and Yahoo (hence the 'or so') and IBM don't have the relevance that they once did.
What happened is that the landscape shifted out from under many of the incumbents...from hardware to software. The one survivor (I won't consider Oracle because Altman didn't), was the one given an excuse to change its very profitable business practices by anti-trust prosecution. Not that it happened fast by internet standards. But super tankers don't turn on a dime and Wall Street beholden oil tankers probably turn even more slowly.
I guess my big take away is that AFGAM is more of a concern if the world is a finite pie and less so if it isn't.
AFGAM is more of a concern if the world is a finite pie and less so if it isn't
The infinite pie theory is for all practical purposes impossible. Growing pie theory works on beyond lifetime scale, but not for decade level scale. So it does matter because a startup can't last for two decades to try and gain market share against an incumbent.
I don't disagree. But money is a construct and not tied to gold or something similar, so the boundary of the pie is not fixed and what it is made of is not fixed either.
Anyway, Amazon is still the underdog going up against Walmart which twenty years on has really good technical chops and turns over a lot more goods and has phenomenally good logistics...think about who is going to benefit more from autonymous trucks. While it has the overhead of a vehicle fleet it is not at the mercy of UPS and Fedex and for a lot of goods, ordering online and picking up at the local Walmart is about as good as door to door shipping.
Anyway, in some ways Netflix is more likely to be crushed by Walmart than Amazon...and Disney is even more likely than either of them. As internet purchases and bandwidth increasingly become commodities, companies with long horizons become more formidable particularly in markets that matter...the players in the mobile market are Deutsch Telecom and ATT not plucky entrepreneurs. The big car makers are moving on self-driving cars and they already have down the really hard part of making cars...software can be copied.
What happened is that the landscape shifted out from under many of the incumbents...from hardware to software. The one survivor (I won't consider Oracle because Altman didn't), was the one given an excuse to change its very profitable business practices by anti-trust prosecution. Not that it happened fast by internet standards. But super tankers don't turn on a dime and Wall Street beholden oil tankers probably turn even more slowly.
I guess my big take away is that AFGAM is more of a concern if the world is a finite pie and less so if it isn't.