Wouldn’t this be equivalent to someone who inherited six figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to purchase Apple shares?
This is the opposite, the big companies closed their messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low performing departments and consolidate, instead of maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish which would be a form of diversification.
Right. And the analogy also fails because buying Apple shares is as easy as selling them; what makes the destruction of all the original IM platforms so dumb is that it's a one-way move. Once you shut one down, there's no Ctrl-Z.
I think that was the correct call - hindsight is always easier to identify great stocks! In 2010, before I believed in index funds, I had an extra $1k and I was debating to put it in AAPL or this new thing I heard of called bitcoin. I ended up buying apple, and sold it after it doubled thinking I did great... Certainly not a bad outcome but it just goes to show how hard it is to predict anything.
It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.