Collection: Charlie Munger - #210 'Apple, Microsoft and Google'

[Transcript]

BECKY QUICK 00:00

Pollyanni from Toronto, Canada writes and says, "Do the great tech franchises of our day, specifically Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet, have the same long-term durability that Coca-Cola had 30 to 40 years ago?"

CHARLIE MUNGER 00:14

Well, of course, it’s a lot easier to predict who flourished in the past because we know what happened in the past. But now I want to compare what’s gonna happen in the future. Of course, that’s harder.

It’s very hard for me to imagine — that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen — but I would expect Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet to be strong 50 years from now — really strong, still strong.

But if you’d asked me when I was young what was gonna happen to the department stores that went broke or the newspapers which were broke, and so on, I wouldn’t have predicted that either. So I think it’s hard to predict how your world is going to change if you’re going to talk about 70, 80, 90 years.

Just imagine, they wiped out the shareholders of General Motors, they wiped out the shareholders at Kodak. Who in the hell would have predicted that? This technological change can destroy a lot of people. And it’s hard to predict for sure in advance.

But the telephone company is still with us. It’s just uses a different way of doing it. So some things remain and some vanish.

(Source: https://youtu.be/8RxLj9OVqLo)

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[YAPSS Takeaway]

Everything can fall and will fall but we do not know when, so keep your eyes open and keep learning about businesses.