Indeed, that's the point. You can't predict what's going to be the big winner of the next 20 years, but you can predict that some brands are going to be fairly safe and will at least not wipe you out without notice.

Sure you could have gone all-in on Amazon at IPO (ooh an online book cd sales company, with MP3s on the horizon), but you could easilly have gone all-in on Pets.com.

You could have invested in yahoo, after all that was the place that ran the web in the 90s - if you weren't on yahoo you didn't have a business. You could have piled into things like friends reunited, myspace, napster, all of which were just as likely to succeed as facebook, yahoo, or apple music.

Even dying companies like Blockbuster and Kodak took far longer to wipe out shareholder value than some new flash-in-the-pan companies.