Is GE (Still) Incoherent?

A principle espoused in The Coherence Premium, and oft evidenced in real life, is that companies with largely disparate sections rarely perform well in the long run. It posits that the main reason that this occurs is because different business areas require significantly different specialties and support business activities. One of its prime examples, ConAgra Foods, was not particularly coherent in the 1990's; selling prepared foods, snacks, and cooking staples all at the same time. Each business required distinct marketing and business focuses and the overall business was unable to provide any business's needs adequately because it was too busy inadequately fulfilling the needs of the other two. As presented, clearly an incoherent business model, despite the seeming topical similarity of all its ventures.

Which begs comparison to General Electric, one of the best known conglomerates in the United States, if not the world. From its Wikipedia page:

 "As of 2016, the company operates through the following segments: aviation, current, digital, energy connections, global research, healthcare, lighting, oil and gas, power, renewable energy, transportation, and capital."

 A business producing a range of goods from heavy industrial machinery to microwaves would probably have fallen under the lens of the authors of The Coherence Premium, and yet GE not only does that, but also has massive banking and health insurances companies under its belt. By all measures, GE should have been suffering under a heavy burden of overdiversified business interests, struggling to succeed financially for many decades. It doesn't seem to have struggled much, but some have suggested that GE was heavily reliant on GE Capital to post profits for much of the decades leading up to the Great Recession, which is one of the reasons GE was so hard-hit in 2008.

Another indication that GE was in fact "incoherent" is that the vast majority of its behavior in the post-Great Recession era has in fact been selling off  or reducing many of its business arms not related to heavy, extremely technical manufacturing. In the last decade, GE has announced deals selling off its property portfolio, large portions of GE Captial, its healthcare business, it's entire appliance business, GE Oil & Gas's water treatment business, and GE Plastics.

Was GE incoherent? Probably. Is it now? Maybe not.