[iso1631]

Yet few predicted just how much the web would change things over the next 10 years, and then mobile computing over the 10 years after that.

If you'd have said in 1997 that the most valuable companies in the world would include Google, Facebook and Amazon you'd have been laughed out of the room, when you then said that failing toy company apple would top the list

Even outside the world of IT, if you'd have told people in 1997 that a new car company would emerge and become one of the most valuable car companies in the world, given it had been 30 years since the previous car company had gone public, you'd have been equally mad.

In 1997 the most valuable companies in the world included Shell, Exxon, Toyota and Coca-Cola.

Predicting 20 years away is hard.

[akg_67]

I am not sure what is your argument. Google and Facebook didn’t even exist in 1997 and Amazon was still in basement of Bezos home.

[iso1631]

Indeed, that's the point. You can't predict what's going to be the big winner of the next 20 years, but you can predict that some brands are going to be fairly safe and will at least not wipe you out without notice.

Sure you could have gone all-in on Amazon at IPO (ooh an online book cd sales company, with MP3s on the horizon), but you could easilly have gone all-in on Pets.com.

You could have invested in yahoo, after all that was the place that ran the web in the 90s - if you weren't on yahoo you didn't have a business. You could have piled into things like friends reunited, myspace, napster, all of which were just as likely to succeed as facebook, yahoo, or apple music.

Even dying companies like Blockbuster and Kodak took far longer to wipe out shareholder value than some new flash-in-the-pan companies.