Question: When you’ve joined the $100+ billion market cap club, what do you do next? Answer: You start invading the other members’ territories (e.g., Amazon is now chasing the digital advertising business that Facebook and Google make billions of dollars from) AND you hire a bunch of pricey lawyers to defend you against antitrust suits.
This club is pretty exclusive today, with American members including mainly Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Netflix. They are so big that to grow significantly they have to look for other big markets (like cloud computing or self-driving cars or Hollywood-type movies) to enter, and most of those big markets are already occupied by other club members or non-member already-large specialists. What are the bloopers here? A classical one would be monopoly/oligopoly pricing and/or restraint of trade. But perhaps more important might be the opportunities lost by a failure to allocate capital to creating useful NEW-AND-DIFFERENT products and services.
opportunity lost is the biggest failure – what a waste of time to chase the same things over and over again – thank you for pointing this out, More people need to write about the failure to lead. thanks again.
These big companies might be criticized by their stock holders if they don’t try to get into the latest fad.. but as you say, good leaders must “allocate capital to creating useful NEW-AND-DIFFERENT products and services” .. we might see the biggest change coming from small, new companies – who heard of Uber or Lyft 5 years ago?
… a failure to allocate capital to creating useful NEW-AND-DIFFERENT products and services.. so true … they are all copying from each other.. what leadership??!!