What’s It Take to Last 100 Years in the Tech Industry?

Identifying the secret sauce that will make a company last a generation is a dream that every entrepreneur or business leader has at one point or another. A century ago, only the most radical optimists or clairvoyant futurists would have predicted that IBM (NYSE:IBM) would become, and remain, one of the most important companies on the planet, and only the same people are likely to predict that it will be a Dow component in another 100 years.

Fortunately for us, there are a few outstanding people who are willing to speculate about which companies will be around in a century. What’s more, they’re willing to put tech companies in the ring, and back up their candidate with a succinct reason why. In this case, that person is Yuri Milner, a self-made billionaire who made it onto the Forbes Top 100 List in 2011 — and those companies are Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and Wikipedia.

Milner didn’t so much argue a point as he answered a question that came in via Twitter at SXSW this weekend. According to Bloomberg, an audience member asked, “IBM survived for 100 years, which tech company will be next and why?”

To put a broad umbrella over Milner’s reasoning: “all three have amazing network effects,” and they are are critical daily habits.