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Quality of engineering and longevity of the company producing the engineered product have nothing to do with each other.

Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long. Xerox PARC, Kodak, and Netscape are examples of companies (or, in PARC's case, a division of a company) that contributed significantly to their fields before becoming defunct. Those contributions aren't worsened or inferior, somehow, because the companies that engineered them are gone.

Whether or not a company is still in business only tells you whether a company is good at keeping itself alive. Over time, that quality is increasingly disconnected from whether a company produces valuable goods or services.



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