[LaundroMat]

It's close to what Clayton Christensen describes as disruptive innovation (his examples were the steel industry and radio's): incumbents are forced higher up the chain by low quality competitors ("home computers are only good for gaming") that answer an unanswered need well enough. Once these competitors gain a foothold, quality improves and incumbents have less and less of a market.

[dbcurtis]

It’s exactly what CC was writing about. It is the way large organizations think unless someone has the courage to recognize that if they don’t start a new division, some little upstart will eat their lunch. Kodak laughed at the early, feeble digital cameras. Bell Labs sat on DSL because it would kill T1 revenue.

But man is it ever hard to execute. Andy Grove made every exec at Intel read Innovator’s Dilemma, but still it was hard to turn that ship.

[fragmede]

You can see the parallels between Kodak creating the first digital camera in 1975, and Google publishing Attention is all you need.