With most companies, the center of gravity is obviously on the customer side. The customer, and the market, is ultimately the boss. With the customer lies the product/market fit, the fickle and life-giving revenue stream, the demand that drives features and product and ultimately existential corporate strategy.
But when you achieve the dominance and size and cash hoard of Microsoft, that center of gravity shifts -- the company becomes so powerful and massive that it generates its own gravity. There is the luxury of a cushion so large that it recedes to infinity, distorting strategy to the point where the necessity of its convergence with the customer may no longer be explicitly contemplated. The wooing of the customer is supplanted by an eternal dance of indoctrinated partners in the ecosystem ballroom. The objective financial success of the arrangement trumpets it to become ever more like itself, unfettered and unfed by the market forces and demand that anneal smaller and more nimble competitors.
And so, numbly disconnected from the healthy signals of the natural customer-centric gravitational pull, this dominant entity finally reaches the ballistic apex of its trajectory, unpowered by the thrust of customer focus, and begins its gradual descent. Maybe the law of large numbers, with respect to enterprise growth, is really more of an inward-looking organizational behavior problem than one of stock market psychology.