It's more how I feel about the SWE culture, not the company's fate. You're right that they're very different scenarios, including the fact that it's not 1997 anymore.
It's just a fundamentally different thing to be working for a company that is not a burning shipwreck. It influences culture and everything else much more strongly than some of the organizational parallels (although I think these are pretty weak as well). Imagine what working at Google would be like if Google was a losing search engine company.
