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What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered.

Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s operating profit and stock price start falling and all their best developers jump ship to better companies (this part has already started). Then they will fully follow the model trailblazed by such erstwhile innovators as Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox.

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I agree about the Sundar and Satya comparison, but I also feel Microsoft has always been in more stable position in terms of diversified revenue sources and its stronghold in business / enterprise market that served as platform for growing other lines of their business.

What makes it late stage is that these decrepit monopolies or pseudo-monopolies are so ensconced in their markets that the share price will not fall appreciably long after calcification has set in.

It always catches up to them eventually. Xerox and Polaroid continued to grow revenues and operating profit for a couple years even after the writing was on the wall that their days were numbered without some kind of big change. It's usually fairly easy to pull various levers to juice those metrics in the short run (especially when there was a lot of fat in costs to start with, and a lot of remaining customer surplus), but this tends to be a one-off thing because it generally pisses of customers/users/employees and hastens the end.

> has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism”

Couldn't agree more, and the ironic thing about this phrase is that it's really more reminiscent of the pre-depression era of robber barons, price fixing, no workers rights, Panic of 18XX where companies really got too powerful and ran wild because there wasn't enough regulation yet

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