My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.