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"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king."

IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook.

> The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation. There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly.

I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U.



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