Professor Elam

The point I am trying to make in the last few blogs about for example VW’s fall is that when someone, something , some trend seems never ending and invincible, that is about the time the trend turns

Consider these changes in my lifetime

Sears-Where America Shops
Woolco, K Mart, Gibson’s in Texas, now WMT mid life crisis, JCP back from the dead
TGT looks good now but can they keep up this torrid pace of expansion, by the way, what happened to Mervyns?
Polaroid-had the entire instant picture business, lost it all in a few years
Kodak had all the film processing and lost it in a few years
Nikon was and stil is the premier camera maker, did not fail to see digital coming
RCA was the tech wonder of the 1920s and even the 1960s but now just sells tvs made by someone else
Xerox-had the entire copy market, patent runs out, loses out to Japanese
Remington Rand, Smith Corona, Underwood-typewriters and office equipment, all gone now
Lands End was a dot.com aka catalog retailer, now lost in Sears shuffle, Sears does not know what to do with it
Playboy, famous trademark and icon of the 70s, now virtually a non profit
Computers-Univac becomes Sperry Univac becomes Unisys which is still check processing
IBM misses the software issue, stock drops 75%
Wang, Commodore, Epson, Packard Bell, Gateway, Control Data CDC,  This is one tough business
Texaco, Unocal, Gulf, Getty, all gone
Soviet Union, the sun never sets on the British Empire, France, all gone in terms of colonial power Soviets now sustained by high oil prices and mob activity
GM down from 50% market share, is this the end of Chrysler, Ford well who knows
How could we compete with Japan in 1989 then their stock market fell 80%
NASD 800 to 5,000 to 1250 to 2500 all in one generation

Managerial accounting is all about exmaning process to maintain market share and competitiveness
As Paul Samuelson observes most proprietorships do not outlast the proprietor, and that can be true for big business too