MAY 9 — The annals of corporate history are littered with the bones of giants.
We speak of them in reverent, almost mythological terms: Kodak, the monarch of memory, whose film captured the 20th century. BlackBerry, the indispensable oracle, whose device first put the world in our pocket.
To discuss their downfall is to engage in a familiar autopsy: they were disrupted. They were too slow. They were arrogant.
But that narrative, while comforting in its simplicity, is dangerously incomplete. It implies that if we just run fast enough, we will be safe.
The truth, as revealed by the ghosts of these titans, is far more unsettling. The tragedy of Kodak and BlackBerry is not that they failed to see the future, but that they invented it — and then chose to protect the past instead of embracing it.
Kodak’s story is the original sin of corporate complacency. It is a common myth that Kodak was blindsided by the digital camera. The reality is far more damning: a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, invented the first digital camera in 1975.
The company’s leadership looked at this clunky, low-resolution prototype and did the math.
They saw a technology that would cannibalise their golden goose— the sale of chemical film, which came with a beautiful, recurring revenue model of processing.
They didn’t kill the idea out of ignorance; they killed it out of intelligence. It was a rational, short-term business decision to protect a monopoly.
They assumed they had time, that the transition would be gradual, and that their brand would carry them through.
They forgot that in technology, the graveyard is paved with companies that managed the present perfectly while the future ambushed them from the flanks.
By the time they realised digital was not a niche product but the new paradigm, the world had moved on to Canon, Nikon, and eventually, the camera phone.
If Kodak’s demise was about failing to monetise an invention, BlackBerry’s was about failing to reimagine an experience. BlackBerry didn’t just build a phone; they built an addiction.
The “CrackBerry” was a status symbol, a productivity tool so effective that presidents and CEOs refused to leave home without it. They had a stranglehold on the enterprise market.
But success breeds a specific kind of blindness. When Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, it wasn’t just a better phone; it was a fundamentally different philosophy.
It treated the device not as a tool for work, but as a portal for life. BlackBerry’s co-CEO at the time, Mike Lazaridis, famously dismissed it as just another competitor.
“It’s a complicated product,” he said, insisting that people wanted a keyboard for typing.
This was the hubris of the functional. BlackBerry believed that their customers — the serious professionals — would never trade security, battery life, and a tactile keyboard for a fragile glass screen and a touch keyboard.
They were optimising for efficiency in a world that was starting to optimise for emotion and ecosystem. They didn’t realise that the iPhone wasn’t competing with them on specs; it was competing with them on imagination.
By the time BlackBerry scrambled to build a touchscreen and an app store, the gravitational centre of the universe had shifted.
So, what are the lessons for the leaders of today?
First, we must stop treating innovation as a department. It is not a lab you fund or a quarterly metric you hit.
It is a cultural paranoia that must be baked into the boardroom. When a CEO looks at a disruptive technology and asks, “How do we protect our margin?”, they are asking the wrong question. The right question is, “If we don’t do this, who will?”
Second, the biggest risk is often not taking one. Kodak and BlackBerry saw the risks of the new — investing in unproven tech, alienating existing partners, confusing the market.
They failed to see the existential risk of the status quo. They were so afraid of the fall that they forgot you can’t stay at the top forever unless you are willing to climb a new mountain while still standing on the old one.
Ultimately, the fall of these giants is a warning about the seduction of success. They didn’t fail because they were lazy or stupid.
They failed because they were once so spectacularly right that they convinced themselves they could never be wrong.
In a world that is changing at an exponential rate, the greatest competitive advantage is not what you know, but the humility to admit that what you know might be irrelevant tomorrow.
Innovation, in the end, is not about technology. It is about the courage to burn your own ships before someone else does it for you.
* Professor Datuk Dr Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at [email protected].
