Comment by Certhas
7 months ago
AT&T: 15B$ net income, world largest telecom company. #13.0n Fortune 500.
GE, while a reasonable example of a company that declined severely from its peak, was still generating 9B$ in income on 2023 before being split in better focused and profitable successors.
AOL/Yahoo were never dominant in a mature market. They were early to the Internet, but this was an uncharacteristically volatile time with an exponentially growing market.
Sony is also a leading manufacturer in several tech sectors (second largest camera, largest premium TVs). 6B$ net income and rising.
3DFx was never dominant in a mature field but, again, early in a nascent one. They collapsed quickly, not through some highly profitable extended death spiral.
Compaq was never dominant in a highly profitable field. Their market share peaked at 14%.
DEC might be a genuine example, they were never the top of the field, but they did not manage to adapt and turn things around when the world moved in a different direction. Compare to IBM who _were_ in a dominant position in the same field, and have leveraged that position into a sustainable and steady, if smaller and less groundbreaking, business.
Google might be in trouble (relatively speaking) if LLMs disrupt search, but they are not close to being in trouble from being outcompeted in search itself.
Are you really doing this?
AT&T: today is not AT&T. The name was bought. It used to be Cingular.
GE: so your point is that it is a good example.
AOL/Yahoo: A 'mature market'? Are you making up rules so you can disqualify them?
Sony today only innovates in image sensors. They are a financial and entertainment company. Who cares if they sell the most 'premium TVs', this is the company created (off the top of my head) Betamax, CDs, DVDs, Minidiscs, Trinitrons, and made the best consumer tech in the world -- consistently.
3Dfx was the leader of an industry that is now lead by nVidia. That industry wasn't as big then, but everyone knew it would be and it was theirs to lose.
Compaq was the market leader in PC sales in the 90s.
DEC: so, it is a good example.
I used the term "as established as google". In my mind this certainly meant the market has to be established. As long as an industry is brand new and rapidly developing, things are obviously different. Many early market leaders didn't make it in the internet. But in the last ten years, market leaders haven't been failing in the same way.
So no, not changing the rules, but maybe clarifying the point. Situations such as the rise of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s are the anomaly, not the rule.
Operating Systems and Internet search are roughly the same they were ten years ago. 3d accelerator cards changed immensely in the years when 3dfx failed. Microsoft and Google are not in businesses where younger agile companies that read the changing tides better can quickly supplant them.
And that's why they get a thousand chances to turn things around while printing money with their "death spiralling" business.
Your question is effectively answerable as 'no' if you want to limit it to exactly google like market positions, because they haven't existed before. I was answering with examples of market leaders that fell due to bad top-down decisions.