Precisely

What would that look like in the statistics?

Something like this: https://www.investopedia.com/news/5-companies-amazon-killing...

Are there particular companies that you think are doing this successfully?

FAANG are the examples here. Look at the top 10 most used apps[1].

5/10 are Google owned

3/10 are Facebook owned

1 is owned by Apple

Amazon in clearly leading here as it has 49% of the ecommerce market share.

Microsoft has the vast majority of the IT ecosystem.

Facebook the company is doing well in this area. Google is also doing well here.

Creating (rather than buying at great expense) successful new products

I'm not sure why "buying at great expense" is relevant here. At the end of the day it comes down to longevity. The longest lasting companies are ones which have bought themselves into relevancy. That's the whole point. They have the market capacity to buy out or crush their competition.

Facebook used Instagram to crush Snapchat in pretty much every dimension because Snap wouldn't sell to them.

All your other metrics are kind of random and I'm not sure if there is anything that says those things lead to longevity. The few companies who were good at this in the past (Standard Oil, Bell, Railroads) eventually got broken up by the government.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/most-used-smartphone-apps-20...

I think it's a little early to say whether Facebook or Google will have the kind of longevity of a GE, ExxonMobil or DuPont. Longevity on its own doesn't actually seem particularly interesting, what makes those three stand out is staying large and relevant for so long, not merely surviving.

> All your other metrics are kind of random and I'm not sure if there is anything that says those things lead to longevity. The few companies who were good at this in the past (Standard Oil, Bell, Railroads) eventually got broken up by the government.

My metrics were directed partly at that point. Microsoft was a more recent target of government. It looks much more likely today that Facebook, Google or Amazon would be targets of government action (with plenty of public support) than it did just a few years ago.

“Are the FAANGs the first perfect economic actors in human history?”

No. I remember people making the same arguments for mortgage back securities.

So much worship of so much snake oil.

That's a great way to put it, and my answer would be: Of course not, but they are probably the closest we've ever seen and are on a vector that keeps them getting closer.

Maybe Facebook the product is, but not the compliment of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Oculus etc...

Now Facebook has risen a long way and has a lot of buffer to recover from missteps and challenges. I'm not counting them out yet or saying they're facing an existential threat soon but the shine has very clearly come off in the last couple of years. There's certainly room for debate about the magnitude of the challenges they face and how well placed they are to overcome them but I don't see how anyone can question they are already stumbling.

Look at the fundamentals [1]. Facebook (the product), Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger completely dominate the social web. Oh and in case you thought Snap was a competitor, realize that Snap pays Google $2B a year and Amazon $1B a year for Cloud Services. On Flat growth and relatively terrible network effects. FB doesn't have to pay anyone because it has it's own services.

No other collection of social networks or advertising networks are coming anywhere close to them. Nobody is seriously threatening their business model. The recent Frontline piece was really hard on them, but there's nothing there really tangibly. Here's the reality:

Facebook has the predominance of internet users across all platforms and still growing 11% annually.

Facebook still sells advertising that converts better than any other advertising platform.

Facebook has diversified and built information networks on par with Amazon and Google to prevent (as much as anyone has ever done) any competitor from surprising them.

The only possible thing that could happen is some government trying to shut them down. Honestly though without specific legislation against them and only them, it won't work. You can't kill the advertising model with legislation and you can't kill data collection (Like GDPR is trying to do) without it impacting all players - if anything it hurts small players more.

So no, I don't see them stumbling. In fact I don't see one example of Facebook, Amazon or Google being surprised by any challenging upstart in the last 5 years. They might have been rejected for buyouts, but they weren't surprised.

[1] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...