It always catches up to them eventually. Xerox and Polaroid continued to grow revenues and operating profit for a couple years even after the writing was on the wall that their days were numbered without some kind of big change. It's usually fairly easy to pull various levers to juice those metrics in the short run (especially when there was a lot of fat in costs to start with, and a lot of remaining customer surplus), but this tends to be a one-off thing because it generally pisses of customers/users/employees and hastens the end.