Comment by mschuster91

I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.