[nostrademons]

There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:

1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.

2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.

3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.

4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.

[cb321]

That is a good list. While I'm sure many companies could be added, I only post to include DEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation whose `vt50/vt100/vtXX` ideas may be with us, in software, for perpetuity unless something like Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/) ever takes off.

[mikenew]

Arcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.

[jtolmar]

There's a really noticeable difference in time frame covered in your examples (80s and 90s) and the one in the comment you're replying to (2010s and 2020s).

Is that just two people with different go-to examples? Or is there something going on here?

(I don't mean this as a leading question to some conclusion in my back pocket, I genuinely have no clue.)

[corford]

It's politics.

The US's corporate problems in the 1980s and early 1990s existed when strong international competition existed.

It began to change with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord.

It was accelerated further with things like anti-circumvention clauses in Free Trade agreements (see Cory Doctrow's recent highlighting of this: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/) and then had more gasoline thrown on the fire in the ZIRP/easy money era post GFC, culminating with the bazooka of stimulus unleashed post-covid.

My best guess is we are now going to witness ~20 years of slow unwind. You can already see signs of this in things like RoW/EM stocks outperforming the S&P, treasury yields diverging from other "safe haven" soverign bonds (e.g. swiss), gold price rising, Europe starting to get serious about addressing the Draghi report's findings, European defence spending increasing, China starting to act like the "adult in the room" wrt the recent Iran/US blow-up etc. Essentially, countries/blocs attempting to re-assert sovereignty that has been willingly diluted over the last ~30 years to mainly America's benefit.

[nostrademons]

Somewhere else in the comments here, someone else remarked "Individuals perhaps [move to the new models], but not organizations."

That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively.

We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

[Dumblydorr]

“Brought on by government edict”

No, brought on by a novel pathogen that killed 10 million people. It would’ve been much worse without government action.

[pocksuppet]

Without the indecisive government action that was taken, millions more people would have died, but the economy would have done better.

With decisive government action (see New Zealand), millions less people would have died, and the economy would have done better.

[klipt]

New Zealand does have the advantage of an ocean border and thus near total control on entries and exits.

Compared to the very porous land borders of the US.

[pocksuppet]

Come on, they're not that porous, certainly under a Trump administration. People fly into NZ too.

[Xunjin]

This argument is so flawed in many ways, economies are built by people for people. Extrapolate the numbers, let's say in the COVID Pandemic a country, take USA as example, has 10% percentage of their population killed by it, would that be better to the economy?

[etcimon]

There's multiple ways to look at the economy, the raw exchange of dollar currency in a debt chase (shit I need to run faster & pay down this stuff!), there's the productivity of industrial output (shit we need to sell more junk and useless crap!), and there's the stock and productivity in optimal life cycles (Damn, that Nokia is a tank!)

If 10% of the population went away, it would affect 1 & 2, but in any true practical lens, there's a ton of cheap empty houses, while on the other hand building repairable stuff that lasts or enough cheaply is where economies move to more complex technologies by saving time and effort in useless endeavour of debt chases or consumption-oriented wasteful productivity

[pocksuppet]

Economies are built by rich people for rich people. A few million poor people dead doesn't really make a dent in them.

[rdbl27]

The case of Sweden entirely falsifies the theory that "it would've been much worse without government action."

No government action whatsoever was taken in Sweden. None. Death rates were no better or worse than adjacent countries that intervened extensively.

Ergo, government intervention was irrelevant one way or another.

[arkh]

> The next one is likely to be a doozy

The US, EU, China are teetering on the edge of a crisis. Russia is well on its way.

I feel like 2008 was just a warmup to what may be coming.

[davedx]

The EU is not "teetering on the edge of a crisis", why do you say that?

[cezart]

Not OP but, EU economy is being squeezed by China on the industrial and tech front, and by the US on the innovation/startup front. It is clear EU is no longer at the technological/economic frontier like it used to be 10-20 years ago. At the same time there are serious demographic, budgetary and political challenges all across the continent. Dragi's report covers some of these. It feels like the whole system might fall into a crisis soon if measures are not taken

[abirch]

Factor in that Europe is powerful partly because of its unity and there are many forces trying to undermine that.

[logicchains]

More likely it just slowly declines like Japan. Or if anti-migrant sentiment continues growing at the current rate, it breaks into a race war when the AfD and PFN win the majority of votes in Germany and France respectively.

[neonstatic]

> Russia is well on its way.

Including the warmongering angry midget next to the US, EU, and China is funny. Russia's economy, before they decided to shoot themselves in the face, was the size of the Netherlands. Whether they are in a recession or not is irrelevant to anyone but them.

[ben_w]

I thought Russia was about 2x the Netherlands by nominal, and 5x by PPP?

More relevantly, they were one of the world's petrol stations, and now they're not.

[neonstatic]

You are right: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

[cs702]

> the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

Yeah, it sure feels true.

There's even a book about it, you know, to help people cope with it:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on...

[Jedd]

100% agree with the sentiment here, but a small nitpick - MS SQL originated as a port of Sybase onto (IIRC) OS/2.

[zmgsabst]

Also cases where both happened, eg, Xerox wasn’t wiped out but copiers now have multiple vendors at the high end and have commodity via other brands at the low end.

[cmiles8]

There’s a difference between proprietary software thats highly profitable maintaining a stronghold over “cheaper” options and a massively overvalued and artificially inflated ecosystem having to confront economic realities.

We are seeing the later start to unravel.

[steelframe]

I've heard it said that Oracle doesn't have customers. They have hostages.

[margorczynski]

Still, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.

[andriy_koval]

My bet is that in some industries like banking, PG share is minuscule.

[ak1ng]

Sun didn't die because of the workstation market. It survived much longer.

[galangalalgol]

It pivoted to server market and people who didn't think running linux was professional enough. Workstations were being held afloat by that pivot. Also they were general purpose instead if limiting their workstation market to just one niche.

[Obertr]

second this. great analysis

[Obertr]

also docker is an interesting example. bc its so hard to earn money on it being such a deep commodity you can not close source