Federal Express was persistent in one main philosophy - get the package there in one night. Federal Express was bashed in its beginning days for being nuts, crazy, and out of mind. How could one possibly ship a package overnight, and get it there on time? Fedex was persistent and held with their goals. Fedex didn't give up when someone proved to Fedex that it was impossible to ship a package in 24 hours from Japan to Mexico. Fedex made the impossible happen, by being persistent and ignorant.

McDonalds has been selling hamburgers and french fries forever. They are persistent. McDonalds has these new products that come out such as Pizzas and Salad's, but their persistent product line is hamburgers and french fries.

Oreo cookies have been persistently selling Oreo cookies for eons.

I would guess that Microsoft has failed in the server market since Linux has that covered. But if Microsoft tries hard enough and persists, more people will adopt their servers. Microsoft operating systems have become more stable albeit more bloated. They once failed and had plenty of bugs in their software. They still fail and have bugs - but they are persistent - they eventually produce more reliable operating systems.

Failing and winning are far more complicated than just stating a law such as "don't be persistent, quit when you fail". The most successful people keep failing and failing. If they are persistent enough, they succeed. Inventors, scientists, and businesses all fail plenty of times.

Without being persistent (and at least having some consistency), the business, scientist, or inventor doesn't have a chance. A business, scientist, or inventor must be persistent and somewhat consistent. A business must go through failures. Even Mac OS may have been a failure in the early days - but they were persistent and now all the Artists and Graphic people buy the Mac's because Apple was persistent and kept on going. Just giving up as soon as a big failure takes place isn't always the right thing to do.

Some Olympic athletes fail, and fail, at the same sport - runners keep running, and some runners who have failed in the 1500M race or the 100M race eventually win. These runners don't become weight lifters, boxers, or hockey players as soon as they have a big failure in a race.