General Motors Thought They Were Invulnerable, Too

Last month, when I profiled Alvin Toffler’s new book, Revolutionary Wealth, I wrote in TCS Daily:

The death late last month of John Kenneth Galbraith helps to illustrate just how much the American economy — and indeed the world’s — has changed over the last four decades. Galbraith could plausibly write in 1967’s The New Industrial State, that large corporations were immune to market forces.

To some extent, the Internet has restored that feeling amongst its biggest players. Drudge, Amazon, Google, eBay and a few others got there early, and each built unique business models that kept their customers more or less pretty happy over an extended period. And while the Long Tail is a growing phenomenon, by and large, the Internet has rewarded the early adopters who both got in before the dot.com boom/bust of 1999-2000, and weathered the storm. But lately, as Glenn Reynolds notes in his MSNBC blog, Google appears to believe it’s as invulnerable to market forces as General Motors did in 1973:

Google has been a huge deal