Corning Incorporated is usually filed under one heading: a glass company, founded in 1851 and headquartered in Corning, New York. That description is true and also misses the pattern the company's own history keeps repeating, which is not staying in glass so much as periodically leaving whatever most of its own revenue was built on and re-placing its material science somewhere new.
The clearest earlier example is Corning's own consumer kitchenware business. CorningWare, Visions Pyroceram cookware, Corelle tableware and Pyrex bakeware made Corning a household name for most of the twentieth century, and then the company divested that entire consumer product line in 1998 rather than defend it. What remained was a company built around industrial and scientific materials rather than kitchen shelves, and by 2014 it reported five major business sectors: display technologies, environmental technologies, life sciences, optical communications and specialty materials.
The clearest recent example is Gorilla Glass. Corning developed it working with Steve Jobs in 2007 to build the first iPhone's screen, and it has been one of Apple Inc.'s main suppliers ever since. A company whose earlier headline product was an oven safe casserole dish became, within a decade, one of the physical materials that lets a modern smartphone survive being dropped. Read this way, Corning's real product across a century and three quarters has never been any single glass object. It is the willingness to keep re-deciding, in public, what glass is for.