While you’re not wrong at all in the concept of your post, I wouldn’t call AOL a particularly innovative company. They basically innovated once and then went straight into lazy rent-seeking for the rest of their existence.

I don’t know if I would put Cisco or Nortel in that category, either. They were like gold rush pickaxe companies. The pickaxes themselves weren’t particularly innovative in their case.

A lot of the innovative companies from the dot com era are still around.