Thanks for the interesting perspective! But I also do think that 'stubbornness' cannot always be a metric to judge a company's trajectory - In fact, stubbornness may have helped Apple succeed in a sense - they were pretty stubborn in their belief that touchscreens are the future. I believe that rapid downfalls of large companies are very difficult to predict based on similar history or a bunch of characterizing attributes, and so is their rapid rise. IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, a pivotal event, but it did not make IBM an AI superpower. Until 2 years back no one in their wildest dreams would have imagined that any company could threaten Google's dominance - and definitely not by a small start up research company called Open AI. But it did happen, and we are now in a future where AI is common everyday conversation. IBM is no longer the top AI company, but is still pretty big - in all likelihood, the same might happen to Apple and Google. But who knows, may be they really will be the next Nokia or Blackberry ;)