Consider Google for a while. For a while, I went out somewhere else, looking for greener pastures and a less intrusive medium of information. Then all the sudden one day, I got to thinking "what the hell". Google is a transient. The latest of a bunch of media darlings riding the wave of digital technology.
We know all of them, old geezers like me remember the elephants who have gone to the graveyard. Data General, Digital, Sun, Compaq, Atari. They start out like IBM as world straddling behemoths, then gradually die out as the digital ecosystem they set out to exploit morphs beyond the feeble dreams of their business plans.
Google will do the same. It is built around the lamed and dying economic models that gave us globalization and the housing boom, easy credit and high-velocity money. As the world changes to the smaller and more local systems that will be our lot, Google will join the other dead elephants in the graveyard.
Look at the Dow Dones companies in 1920, 1959, and now:
1920
1920
| American Can | Baldwin Locomotive | Texas Company |
| American Car & Foundry | Central Leather | U.S. Rubber |
| American Locomotive | Corn Products * | U.S. Steel |
| American Smelting | General Electric Company | Utah Copper |
| American Sugar | Goodrich | Western Union |
| American Telephone & Telegraph | Republic Iron & Steel | Westinghouse Electric |
| Anaconda Copper |
1959
| Allied Chemical | General Electric Company | Sears Roebuck & Company |
| Aluminum Company of America * | General Foods | Standard Oil of California |
| American Can | General Motors Corporation | Standard Oil (NJ) |
| American Telephone & Telegraph | Goodyear | Swift & Company * |
| American Tobacco B | International Harvester | Texaco Incorporated (formerly Texas Company) |
| Anaconda Copper * | International Nickel | Union Carbide |
| Bethlehem Steel | International Paper Company | United Aircraft |
| Chrysler | Johns-Manville | U.S. Steel |
| Du Pont | Owens-Illinois Glass * | Westinghouse Electric |
| Eastman Kodak Company | Procter & Gamble Company | Woolworth |
3M Company Dupont McDonald's Corporation Alcoa Incorporated Exxon Mobil CorporationMerck & Company, Incorporated American Express Company General Electric Company Microsoft Corporation AT&T Incorporated Hewlett-Packard Company Pfizer Incorporated Bank of America Corporation Home Depot Incorporated Procter & Gamble Company Boeing Corporation Intel Corporation Travelers Companies* Caterpillar Incorporated International Business Machines United Technologies Corporation Chevron Corporation Johnson & Johnson Verizon Communications Inc. Cisco Systems, Inc.* J.P. Morgan Chase & Company Wal-Mart Stores Incorporated Coca-Cola Company Kraft Foods Inc. Walt Disney Company
Guys...have fun with this as long as the idiots keep providing it for free.
It ain't gonna last
I'll keep blogging and I will remember to save backups of everything on my hard drive.......never hurts
1 comment:
Interesting how it's gone from American manufacturing and quality tangible items to junk food, financial thieves, entertainment, and fluff. The wheels will come off the Chinese rollercoaster...
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