I remember a talk I attended by Rodney Brooks roughly 4 years ago, in which he used this example to show how exponential change catches up. He quoted a Kodak executive who remarked that it was the future and they all knew it, but they just let it slide after that. Why? As Mr. Graham's recent essay about Yahoo! pointed out Kodak had a cash cow in the form of film and they didn't want to see something as radically disruptive as a digital camera. Everyone knew about it, but they didn't want to see it. I think that its quite an understandable form of self deception.
So, what they did was they put it under a pillow and hoped that it would go away. A smaller competitor on the other hand had nothing to lose discovered the technology and along with others exponentially improved it (the megapixels war) until the film was outdated at last. If you think about it if Kodak had been willing to go out of their comfort zone they would have owned the camera market today.
The most interesting thing is that if everything had been a constant then it wouldn't have mattered. Self deception works really well in fields like politics etc. but over here we had a phenomena that accelerated the change and suddenly we had a positive feedback cycle to sustain it. This is why technology is so interesting in my opinion. Opinions don't matter. If something has technological merit then regardless of the fact of what you think about it. It's going to improve and take over your constant.
What's troubling though is just how counter-intuitive it is and just how many of us fall into the trap of thinking; 'nah it ain't gonna happen'.
So, what they did was they put it under a pillow and hoped that it would go away. A smaller competitor on the other hand had nothing to lose discovered the technology and along with others exponentially improved it (the megapixels war) until the film was outdated at last. If you think about it if Kodak had been willing to go out of their comfort zone they would have owned the camera market today.
The most interesting thing is that if everything had been a constant then it wouldn't have mattered. Self deception works really well in fields like politics etc. but over here we had a phenomena that accelerated the change and suddenly we had a positive feedback cycle to sustain it. This is why technology is so interesting in my opinion. Opinions don't matter. If something has technological merit then regardless of the fact of what you think about it. It's going to improve and take over your constant.
What's troubling though is just how counter-intuitive it is and just how many of us fall into the trap of thinking; 'nah it ain't gonna happen'.