>>>>The point is that firms doing marvelously well in one scenario cannot cling to it as the tide comes in. They need to react.
>>
>>Yes,,they do, but sometimes the best reaction is to just fold up your tent and do something completely different with your cash and energy.
>>
>>It doesn't follow that the succeeding technology will be as lucrative as the one being supplanted
>>A great example is Kodak. Their ROI on film manufacture and processing was huge and they made scads of money at it for decades.
>>That has all but disappeared, and Kodak is an also ran player in the digital foto market.
>>Does that mean that Kodak blew it?
>>They only blew it if investing in digital foto tech was a better investment for the shareholders than were competing investments and that's not clear at all.
>>
>>Another good example is IBM. Did they blow it by not becoming a leader in PC manufacture as they had been in mainframes?
>>Their ROI looks pretty good right now and they got out of the business.
>>
>>One of the posts here pointed to a link (I wish I had saved the linkt) where a tech exec said:
>>"We are on a burning platform"
>>
>>All of our platforms seem to be subject to burning now, so it's a good time to let things simmer down for a while and not chase things that might fit the classic depiction:
>>
>>"It's like mackerel by moonlight
>>it shineth but it stinketh"
>>
>
>IBM actually was a market leader in the early PC days. They were the dominant manufacturer, not to mention their role with PC-DOS and OS/2, through the early 80s. Then an armada of competitors who were willing to sell for a lower price and lower margin appeared and IBM decided to cede the business, as you say. The margins were not what IBM was used to.
>
>My first PC was an IBM XT with 256 kb of memory (paid extra for the upgrade from 128K ;-) ), a 20 MB hard drive, a crap monitor you wouldn't let the dog play with these days, and a NEC SpinWriter daisy wheel printer. Over $7000 in 1984 dollars. I should have hung onto it just so I could donate it to a museum.

He$$, I should have kept my first portable:
one of those compaq double shoe boxes with a green screen slightly larger than todays smartphone screens...
and my first intel workstation (after an interlude with atari sporting 4MB of linear RAM)
having 8MB and OS/2 still in text mode - that cost serious money back then...