Mark Twain is supposed to have said: “Julius Caesar is dead, Shakespeare is dead, Napoleon is dead, Abraham Lincoln is dead, and I am far from well myself . . .”
The same can be said for products and companies. They don’t last forever.
What is one to do?
First of all, “Make hay while the sun shines.” When you have something good going, push the heck out of it. Who knows how long it will last.
Second, stay alert and flexible! If the buggy whip manufacturers had switched to selling driving gloves back when Horseless Carriages first started selling like crazy…. well, they would probably still be in business.
Third, realize that change also means opportunity.
Quite a few millionaires emerged from the ashes of the Great Depression. Japan was all but destroyed by World War II. Out of the rubble and chaos, some of the world’s greatest companies emerged – Toyota, Sony, Nissan, others.
I guarantee that the major recession we are finally (hopefully) now coming out of, has created huge opportunities.
If you can see a need not being filled, and work out a way to satisfy that need – and to make your solution known – you could have the next Google or Facebook.
There will be a next Google. It won’t be a better search engine, probably, but it will be just as obvious, through a rear view mirror.
It’s the geniuses who can see those opportunities now, who will be household names, two or three or five years from now.