[karma_vaccum123]

Last I checked the average corporate lifespan in the US is 25 years, so these numbers don't seem abnormal to me. Indeed it is amazing that IBM is even still around.

I find it more peculiar that people think companies "must" (or even should) have long-term survival as a goal.

[sgnelson]

I've wanted to sit down for a while now and chart out company lifespans over the past 100 years. I could very well be wrong, but I have a feeling that just as technology/product life cycles are getting shorter, so too are the life cycles of companies.

note: There are of course many aspects that would make this a bit of a difficult thing to study, mergers and acquisitions being just one for instance, and at least for small businesses, "birth" and especially "death" dates are incredibly hard to pin down. But still something I've been interested in for a while.

[majewsky]

I'm eagerly waiting for your "Show HN". :)

By the way, the hardest part IMO would not be accounting for mergers/acquisitions etc., but accounting for the survivorship bias of just forgetting about the companies that were once big but which we don't even remember anymore.

[gleenn]

Buffet tries to instill that message but maybe that's the polar opposite. He says build a companythat will last a lifetime.