Watching England lose the European Championships to Spain elicited a feeling of déjà vu.
Not just because England lost in an unfortunately similar fashion in 2021, but because England’s performance is reminiscent of a company that fails to adapt to existential disruption. Both companies and the English national team need to be in a perpetual state of paranoia regarding the shifting competitive landscape, emerging disruptive themes, and the threat of rivals and upstarts. Both must ensure they have superior human capital, management, and culture.
Though company lifecycles rarely offer the closure of a thrilling European final, the stakes are just as visceral for employees and shareholders, despite how many fans may feel.
Devastated England fans can take solace that employees of Netscape, a company that dominated the browser industry in the 1990s, know their pain. Netscape, like England, achieved something few others get close to and many can only dream of, however, neither will be immortalised, at least compared to their victorious counterparts—Spain and Google.
Chances of redemption for England and Netscape?
One of my favorite quotes, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it is not okay, it’s not the end”, often attributed to John Lennon, seems not to apply here.
England will never get Euro 2024 back and Netscape like so many other organisations, is unlikely to disrupt Google. At first glance, it appears there is no comeback story here.
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By GlobalDataOr is there?
Maybe John Lennon was right, he normally is
The specific structures of both these groups may be gone but the people are not. The co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, who went on to co-found Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is a key investor in OpenAI.
A comeback bicycle-kick winner in the 93rd of 94 minutes this is not, but it is redemptive.
Google, which has been the dominant search engine since the early 2000s, seems to be most at risk from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
So, it appears Netscape may yet have its revenge, well sort of.
England’s revenge, we hope, will be more straightforward. England has a young squad of developing stars and an under-21 team which, coincidentally, beat Spain in the UEFA European Under-21 Championship final in 2023. English football may remind me of disrupted companies languishing behind their innovations, but what does it remind you of?
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