The permanent arms race under everything else.
PayPal is a case study in opportunistic infrastructure: built on a dead-end tech idea, it succeeded only after latching onto a specific, messy, high-volume use case — eBay auctions — and charging for reliability in a trust vacuum.
Anthropic positions itself as a safety-first AI builder—but its business runs on proprietary models trained with legally contested data, sold under restrictive partnerships, and governed by self-declared public benefit terms that do not prevent mass-scale book scanning or billion-dollar copyright liability.
BlackBerry Limited is a Canadian software company specialising in secure communications and IoT. It was founded in 1984 as Research In Motion (RIM) and developed the BlackBerry brand of wireless mobile devices from 1999 to 2016. After spinning off its mobile division into BlackBerry Mobile in 2016 — discontinued in 2020 — the company transitioned to providing software and services and holds critical software application patents. RIM was the first wireless data technology developer in North America and the first outside the Nordic countries to develop Mobitex connectivity products. In 1996, RIM introduced the Interactive Pager, the first two-way messaging pager. In 1999, RIM introduced the BlackBerry 850 pager, the first device to use the BlackBerry OS, which received push email from Microsoft Exchange Server using BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Its introduction set the stage for enterprise-oriented products, such as the BlackBerry 957 in April 2000, the first BlackBerry smartphone.
Yahoo Inc. (2017–present) is not the original Yahoo!. It is a Delaware-incorporated media entity formed in 2006, acquired by Verizon in 2017 for $4.48 billion — reduced from $4.8 billion after two breaches affecting over a billion users. Verizon wrote down its combined AOL-Yahoo value by $4.6 billion in 2018 and rebranded it Verizon Media in 2019. In 2021, Apollo Global Management acquired 90% for $5 billion, reinstating the Yahoo name and appointing Jim Lanzone CEO. Its $7.4 billion 2020 revenue comes from advertising across vertically focused, high-traffic properties — but it has shed Tumblr, HuffPost, and AOL without replacing their scale or influence.