That was the title of one of my favorite books a long time ago, written by Will Cuppy. I was reminded of this kind of lighthearted zen theory of the world after I recently read a 2005 interview with Linus Torvalds:

I just don’t believe in dynasties. Things erode over time. Successes start to take themselves for granted, and the successful companies aren’t nimble and hungry enough any more.

In the tech market in particular, companies just don’t tend to stay on top forever — they become irrelevant either because of their own missteps or because their market just isn’t the “happening thing” any more. You can only skate the cutting edge for so long.

So the question is how the decline happens, and in what timeframe. Will open source be a factor? Almost certainly. Will it be the factor? I don’t know.

I understand this from a monolithic perspective, like how the human body ages, but what about rebirth or regeneration? Humans have certainly managed to extend their life expectancy, and the rate of successful birth is higher as well. So in the context of dynasties that use descent to survive, does open source accelerate the decline of a tech company, or alternatively does it allow it to extend its life through facilitating a less risky rebirth?

Tough questions, but Cuppy had some historical pointers in his book on how dynasties go awry:

Agrippina had long been a problem to Nero, always interfering as she did and quarreling about who should be murdered and who shouldn’t. (Ed. Note: Agrippina was Nero’s mother.) Since he owed her everything for murdering Claudius, he had hoped to kill her as gently as possible. He did not want her to suffer, and he went to some lengths to prevent it. He gave her quick poison three times without result, then fixed the ceiling of her bedroom so it would fall and crush her as she slept. Of course that didn’t work. It never does. Either the ceiling doesn’t fall or the victim sleeps on the sofa that night.

Next, he attempted to drown her by means of a boat with a collapsible bottom, but the vessel sank too slowly and she swam away like a mink. Nero then lost his head completely, as who wouldn’t, and told his freedman, Anicetus, to try anything. Anicetus, a rude but sensible fellow, went and got a club and beat her to death. Maybe the Cave Men knew best.

We cannot be sure how many others Nero murdered, since some of the stories are probably mere gossip. You know how it is. Once you kill a few people, you get a bad name. You’re blamed for every corpse that turns up for miles around and anything else that goes wrong.

Ah, Nero. Fiddling while Rome burned also probably hurt his legacy and chances to remain competitive, at least compared with those upstart civilizations who believed in lower margins for the ruling-class.