In the world of internet technology a company can go from zero to hero in a very short time
At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
At one level, all this proves is that in the technology world one can go from zero to hero is a very short time. (Or, in Apple's case, from hero to zero and back to hero again in 36 years). Some of the industry's greatest executives understood this very well. Andy Grove, for instance, who led Intel for 11 years, was famous for his mantra "Only the paranoid survive". For many years – when he led Microsoft and before he embarked on saving the world – Bill Gates appeared to have the same sentiment tattooed on his forehead. And in both cases they turned out to be right: though Intel and Microsoft are still significant companies, their dominance has ended. The processors that dominate the market for mobile devices are designed by ARM, a Cambridge company, not by Intel; and Microsoft's monopolistic grip on the desktop computing market turned out to be a wasting asset.
