Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

From the article:

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The first cars were:

- Loud and unreliable

- Expensive and hard to repair

- Starved for fuel in a world with no gas stations

- Unsuitable for the dirt roads of rural America

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Reminds me of Linux in the late 90s. Talking to Solaris, HPUX or NT4 advocates, many were sure Linux was not going to succeed because:

- It didn't support multiple processors

- There was nobody to pay for commercial support

- It didn't support the POSIX standard

>- Starved for fuel in a world with no gas stations

Actually, gasoline was readily available in its rôle as fuel for farm and other equipment, and as a bottled cleaning product sold at drug stores and the like.

>- Unsuitable for the dirt roads of rural America

but the process of improving roads for the new-fangled bicycle was well underway.

Linux won on cost once it was "good enough". AI isn't free (by any definition of free) and is a long way away from "good enough" to be a general replacement for the status quo in a lot of domains.

The areas where it does make sense to use, it's been in use for years, if not longer, without anyone screaming from the rooftops about it.

By the time Linux won it was better - by 2003 you could take a workload that took eight hours on some ridiculous Sun machine and run it in 40 minutes on a Xeon box.