One of the central puzzles of strategy is the persistence of performance. We revisit a research tradition that lays out trends in persistence of performance, to create shared facts for strategy scholars to explain. We extend the time series from prior studies and apply recent methods for measuring performance persistence. We show that persistence of performance is not stable. Notably, our measure shows a decrease in persistence from the beginning of the sample to roughly 2000, followed by a marked increase thereafter. Our evidence suggests that the post-2000 increase in persistence is at least partly attributable to increases in industry concentration associated with the greater importance of software across industries in the late 1990s
