> And be sure to let AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Excite, et al. know that's how it works, as they should have wiped out Google.

AltaVista was a marketing stunt by Digital Equipment Corporation to show off how awesome the 64 bit Alpha processor was.

I'll call BS on that.

AltaVista was a great (I'd argue the best) search engine up until Google. More importantly, it wasn't a marketing stunt, it was the product of a research project and some really great, bright engineers.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[3] Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea,[4][5] along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[6][7]

At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

I agree, it was quite good for the time.

I can justify considering it "marketing" though. They didn't consider it a way of making money, so from a business point of view it was basically a way of showing how good their research was and how powerful their hardware was. (Compare to, say, Deep Blue, or AlphaGo today.)

And to be fair, Google didn't start out knowing how they would make money either.

Yeah; I worked on a Norwegian Internet Index, which had its own search engine (our own crawler and all) back in the mid-late 90s, so I used search engines a lot back then.

Now, from my memory, AltaVista and HotBot? were the key go to players outside of Yahoo. Google was a tiny fringe player at first, until, well of course we all know how that went. So AltaVista was definitely a key player at a very significant time in Internet history.

Infoseek delivered far superior results to altavista in that era.

Ah, I had forgotten about them ... and more:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2064954/where-are-th...

Which doesn't detract at all from the fact that there were a dozen major search players - including AltaVista - that Google bested to take over the market, courtesy of a radically superior product. None of that should have happened if the op premise were correct. The search market was more than saturated.

Turns out one of the many flaws in the op premise, is that you can invent a superior product, or provide a superior service, in an existing category and prosper accordingly. The iPod should have never existed otherwise, there were plenty of existing mp3 players.

It pertains to the traditional physical space as well as tech. Pizza companies as an example have been killing each other for a long time, new ones rise up routinely and displace weak competitors. If the op premise were correct, that'd be impossible. Pizza Hut & Domino's were founded a quarter century before Papa John's.

> This list doesn't stop going.

Survivor bias, and the blindness to survivor bias, does keep going.

That's exactly the point: the survivors prove the op's premise wrong. If the op premise were correct, the survivors would not exist, as that's what the op is claiming (that Intel exists means ARM can't exist; that Microsoft exists, means Redhat can't exist; that Walmart exists, means Amazon can't exist; that Sears existed (ha) means that Walmart could not have existed; and on it goes). Back in reality, that's not how things work. Instead of crushing Apple, Microsoft chose to help them survive. That's one example and it demolishes the op premise completely (ie competitors don't always seek absolute dominion for numerous reasons, such as political concerns; and sometimes competitors are just plain stupid or lazy or blind).

>>like finding a gold nugget. It just doesn't happen very often

>survivors prove the op's premise wrong

Nobody said it was impossible, except you. Recharacterizing a statement so you can knock it down is called a strawman fallacy. You may have heard of them.

You actually point out many examples that reinforce my point. Extremely poorly run companies like Yahoo, Sears, AOL, they're all still around. Microsoft has been poorly run for nearly two decades. It is still here. MS long since lost the server market to Linux, but that didn't stop them from throwing wrenches by proxy with SCO. MS failed miserably trying to approach the smartphone market, but that doesn't stop them from collecting licensing fees on every Android phone sold. Oracle too is trying aggressively to collect some of that Android lucre.

That's how the system works. It's winner take all. Pareto distributions everywhere. Quality products, services, and businesses are wiped out and destroyed by the rent seekers. Long after the rent seekers ceased to be productive contributors to the system, their bloated zombie corpses carry on, sucking the life out of anything new that was lucky enough to survive.

> You can't start a GPU company because they are the GPU Mafia. They'll run you out of business...

You seem pretty emphatic that it's impossible. Also, before you call Nvidia a rent seeker you might wish to look at the amount they spend on R&D and what they're doing in self-driving cars and deep learning.

Of course, a single counter example disproves the claim that it's impossible to compete with an established business.

But more realistically, we can list some successful outliers in a sea of tens of thousands of failed newcomers. It's very difficult indeed, but not impossible.

How many chip companies have seriously threatened Intel in 35 years? Not enough that it makes sense to invest in any of them but Intel. Picking ARM would have been pretty darn lucky.

In an economy the size of the US (much less the globe), as an example, very difficult means a lot of positive outcomes.

nVidia is a positive outcome vs Intel. So is Apple (after all, they sell a couple hundred million units per year of compute devices with their own customized processors, which directly threatens Intel's prosperity, of course thanks again to ARM).

Or see: McDonalds vs the hundred new burger companies (Five Guys, Shake Shack et al) that have cropped up in the last 10-15 years.

Or: Anheuser Busch AmBev vs the thousands of independent brewers that have cropped up and taken an increasingly large slice of a formerly stagnant market (thanks to government regulations) with finite physical shelf space. Talk about a perfect example of how wrong the op premise is.

Tell GM & Ford not to worry about Tesla and the electric car revolution, because they can just kill off Tesla at any time (and yes, some things like that did occur, such as Tucker - thanks to government abuse in the market).

The difference is McDonalds haven't patented "a circular ground meat disc 1-2 cm thick on a similarly shaped bun with high fructose and vinegar sauces and a token minimum of vegetables, including lettuce, pickles and tomato". I think the point is you should only be able to sue against profit a company makes, and damages against current businesses are desirable because it shows someone competing.

To simplify everything all patents should last 5 years max.

> you should only be able to sue against profit a company makes

So nobody should ever be able to sue Amazon for infringement? Do you think other companies accountants would have trouble making profit vanish to avoid lawsuits?

Except most of your examples don't make "the same thing" as the companies you're comparing to.

For the ones that do, like nVidia or Google. The technologies are orders of magnitude more complex now than when they took over their competitors.

ARM is not a great example since they do not manufacture their own chips.

They're the perfect example, because Intel was a thousand times larger than them during the 1990s and they're competitors. If the op premise were correct, Intel should have (must have in fact, if we're going by the deterministic concept put forth) been able to use any number of levers to crush them, easily.

The op premise is trivially easy to prove wrong: it requires infallibility / perfect judgment on the part of competitors. That one thing alone is enough to end the argument put forth - and there are numerous other issues with it.

How could they crush arm when arm would not be infringing intels manufacturing patents. Why do you think intel was unable to make dents into the gpu space? Why did they fail at the soc business ? Why are they having a hard time in the modem business? Why did they have to acquire altera to get in the fpga business? Most hardware companies operate as oligopolies in their fields where the players have a mexican standoff going on with patents. The threat of mutually assured destruction keeps the balance going. Any new entrant faces huge challenges since they dont have the patents to hold others to ransom.

"Intel unable to make dents in the GPU business" must come from a parallel universe. Meanwhile in ours Intel has gobbled up virtually the entire low end GPU market, and is proceeding to take over the middle ground. It's the No 1 or No 2 supplier of GPUs for PCs, depending on who you ask. It's virtually impossible to buy a laptop without an Intel GPU in it. It is widely suspected in my circle (game development) that the only thing stopping Intel from shipping a competitive discrete GPU based on their Gen design (the one that goes into CPUs) is that they get much better margins selling that production capacity as CPUs. Intel sucking out the air of the GPU market is a large part of what's driving NVIDIA into "AI" and "machine learning", and AMD into custom designs (consoles).