Re: History says otherwise
None of the following is pro or anti any product or company. Everything below is applicable for every product and service offering ever. I'll stick with tech, this being El Reg and all.
You can't compare products/markets/models/companies that aren't contemporaries. You can, but there's no point, you could just fabricate all the data and simply focus on the visual appeal of your charts.
You can't compare them because at any given point on a timeline there are countless factors that come together for a few moments and those factors will not all intersect in the same order, nor will they all leave in the same order.
All businesses make (or lose) 100% of their money by anticipating, recognizing and exploiting those factors. The best (product) in the universe is meaningless without all the other factors that make it the best.
Consumer satnav systems were worthless (and stupid expensive) when signal accuracy was intentionally degraded. 'Social networks' weren't even feasible until free web mail became a thing.MP3 was a dream until broadband penetration was deep enough. CD/DVD was a second choice format until the US Congress taxed the living hell out of DAT. Smartphones were called tricorders and were available only to graduates of Star Fleet Academy until mobile phone networks extended more than three blocks. Moving high tech manufacturing to China wasn't nearly as good of a deal until you could repatriate overseas funds, tax free, if used for R&D. Hell, touchscreen anything was an absolute laughing stock, a HUGE joke until DuPont, 3M, PPG and Corning all, basically stumbled, onto several wholly unrelated materials processes that somebody put all together into today's touch screens. Actual click-to-purchase websites were either always broken or actually charged more than at a retail store until the banks all got together and began developing the framework for online payment that we all still use and would eventually create PayPal and without PayPal we've got no SpaceX or Tesla automobiles.
Zillions of different factors come into play and if you can anticipate and exploit just one of those factors, one single factor , you have an excess money situation to deal with. You hit a few of them and you've got enough money to invade and conquer any Southern Hemisphere country you want.
The reverse is also true. Maybe not as shockingly, suddenly true, but if you misread one of those factors, or something totally surprising blindsides you, one single factor can jeopardize an entire industry and crush huge companies if it's a big enough bad call.
But you must evolve as those factors change. Today's model won't be viable for too terribly long and if you wait too long, or miss your forecast on how things will move you can go from an industry leadership role to a moderately interesting blip in history in a really, really short time.
Back to the original point, because something did or didn't work in the past, doesn't mean it can't/won't work in the future. No industry is a vacuum (not even the vacuum industry) and something completely inconsequential for one group turns another group into wealthy, powerful entities that will make inconsequential internal changes that will knock someone else right out of the gainfully employed category.
Each business, product, market, etc... Must be addressed individually, time and time again because it is 100% certain that something, somehow related, has changed and you've got to decide if the change was significant enough to push a resurrected (something) back into the market.