They&#x27;re the walking dead because they pursued scale over innovation. Once they had achieved scale, they found themselves with too much momentum to innovate. So because they couldn&#x27;t innovate, they built an army of consultants to hawk their wares to customers who also valued scale. But that consulting business never really took off because its existence was predicated on a model of dumping obsolete (but &quot;enterprisey&quot;!) hardware&#x2F;software onto customers already suffering from vendor lock-in. When those customers start to struggle (as they inevitably will, because the tech industry is far from the only one where scale can impede your ability to innovate) the market has moved on to a different place, and the company never kept up. Then you see a death spiral of layoffs and divestitures that destroys 50-90% of shareholder value.<p>Sound familiar? This fate awaits all these companies:<p>- Dell: I don&#x27;t even know what Dell makes anymore. I guess they sell PCs, servers and consulting services to small businesses that don&#x27;t know any better. But this market is being eroded by an army of local MSPs and resellers, and it&#x27;s not a model that benefits from scale.<p>- HP: HP has been a disaster for a while, but they will probably endure since their hardware is generally pretty good and reasonably priced. But servers and printers are not a very high-margin business, and that&#x27;s caused their leadership to be constantly on the hunt for a newer, higher-margin revenue stream.<p>- EMC: Storage is increasingly distributed, and EMC&#x27;s centralized storage solutions really are a dinosaur in today&#x27;s market. They just make the wrong product and never found anything to replace it.<p>- Cisco: By all rights, Cisco shouldn&#x27;t be on this list given that the Internet still largely runs on their hardware. But they convinced themselves they were a consulting company, and that ran off all their good engineers. Cisco today is a shadow of its former self.