Those that stand alone, fall alone. It’s a tidy line to end on in the last post, but it deserves unpacking, because “standing alone” doesn’t mean what it used to.
For most of your career, competing well meant being the strongest single entity in the room. Best product, best team, best price, best relationship. You built the company to win on those terms, and for a long time, that was the whole contest. Your rivals were doing the same thing — building their own single, self-contained strength and putting it up against yours.
Somewhere in the last few years, without an announcement, some of them stopped doing that.