>IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.

"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.

Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).