When Facebook was growing there was a fear on Google that Facebook would lead to Google's irrelevance. Google+ was a very clear response to that. Still, Google couldn't buy Facebook and couldn't kill it.
Microsoft couldn't kill/buy Google, Walmart can't kill/buy Amazon. Microsoft and Walmart are still big, but not that powerful anymore.
So while i think they can buy their would be destroyers, that is actually very hard, because they mostly only realize that too late, or are stopped by something else (Microsoft did buy shares of Facebook before Google).
> From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of firms remain in the Fortune 500.
I used to have a chart which showed the top 10 corporations by market cap, decade by decade. You didn't have to go very far back before you didn't even recognize the company names.
I'm old enough to remember all the fear IBM struck into the hearts of everyone in the computer biz in the 1980s, fear that seems so laughable now it's hard to even remember it.
Same thing in the 1990s, but with Microsoft.
Other companies that inspired fear and certainty they'd take over the world - HP, AT&T, RCA. RCA? Anybody even recall that RCA was the name of a company, and not just the plug ends on your stereo equipment?
Anyone remember that old WKRP episode where they were making fun of the fear of "The Phone Company", i.e. AT&T?
There's a good reason for the decline of large corporations - they get too bureaucratic and complicated to manage efficiently. They tend to accumulate too much entrenched interest in obsolete models and technology. I.e. the world passes them by.
Microsoft couldn't kill/buy Google, Walmart can't kill/buy Amazon. Microsoft and Walmart are still big, but not that powerful anymore.
So while i think they can buy their would be destroyers, that is actually very hard, because they mostly only realize that too late, or are stopped by something else (Microsoft did buy shares of Facebook before Google).