They All Said the Same Thing — Right Before They Disappeared
They All Said the Same Thing — Right Before They Disappeared
There is a meeting that took place in the year 2000 that business schools should be required to teach.
Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, the founders of a small DVD-by-mail company called Netflix, flew to Dallas and walked into the headquarters of Blockbuster Video. At the time, Blockbuster had 9,000 stores worldwide, 60,000 employees, and was worth $6 billion. Netflix was losing money and struggling to survive.
They sat across the table from Blockbuster's CEO, John Antioco, and offered to sell Netflix for $50 million.
Antioco laughed at them.
He called it "a very small niche business." He said the dot-com hysteria was overblown. He sent them home.
Netflix's market cap today is north of $400 billion. The last Blockbuster store on earth is in Bend, Oregon. People visit it as a tourist attraction.
This is not a story about Netflix being clever. It is a story about what happens when intelligent, experienced, successful people look directly at the future and choose not to see it.
The Pattern Is Older Than You Think
John Antioco was not a fool. He was a highly regarded CEO running one of the most recognisable brands in the world. He had data, advisors, market research, and decades of business experience.
He also had something else: a business model that was working perfectly well, and every incentive in the world not to disrupt it.
That is the pattern. It repeats, with remarkable consistency, across every generation and every industry.
In 1975, a young Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built something extraordinary inside Kodak's own laboratory. It was the world's first digital camera. It weighed eight pounds, took 23 seconds to capture a single image, and stored it on a cassette tape. It was crude. It was also the future.
When Sasson presented it to Kodak's management, the response was almost word for word what Antioco would say 25 years later to Netflix. Management called it "cute." They told him not to tell anyone about it. Kodak's own internal research team wrote a report in 1979 predicting that digital photography would completely replace film by 2010. They had the technology. They had the forecast. They had thirty years of runway.
They chose film. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012.
As Sasson later told the New York Times, management's reaction was simple: "It was filmless photography, so their response was — that's cute, but don't tell anyone about it."
They were not protecting ignorance. They were protecting revenue. The tragedy of Kodak is not that they missed digital photography. It is that they invented it, understood it, predicted its dominance, and still could not bring themselves to act.
Nokia's story follows the same script from a different industry. In 2007, Nokia held 49% of the entire global mobile phone market. That same year, Apple launched the iPhone. Nokia's own engineers had developed smartphone prototypes years earlier, but leadership deemed them too risky, too different, too threatening to what was already working. By 2013, Nokia's phone division was sold to Microsoft for a fraction of its former value. The CEO who signed the deal reportedly wept at the press conference and said, "We didn't do anything wrong."
That sentence is the most honest and most heartbreaking summary of how disruption actually works. You don't have to do anything wrong. You just have to stand still while everything moves.
The One Nobody Saw Coming
Here is a more recent example, and arguably a more important one, because it is still unfolding in real time.
For twenty-five years, the sentence "just Google it" was so embedded in daily life that it became a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. Google's search dominance was so total, so unquestioned, that challenging it felt like challenging gravity. In 2020, Google controlled 92% of the global search market. It was the most powerful information gateway in human history.
That number is now 89.87% and falling — for the first time in the company's existence, consistently, in one direction.
ChatGPT now handles 17% of all digital queries globally. AI search traffic grew by 400% across enterprise usage between 2024 and 2025. Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are each taking measurable slices of what was once an untouchable monopoly. Google itself has been forced to rebuild its entire search interface around AI Overviews just to stay relevant to the way people now want to find information.
Nobody predicted this. Five years ago, if you had said that Google's search dominance would be visibly eroding by 2026, you would have been dismissed as dramatic. And yet here we are.
The shift is not complete. Google is not going anywhere tomorrow. But the direction of travel is clear, and it has never moved in this direction before. That alone should tell you something.
If your website isn't optimised for how AI search actually discovers and recommends businesses, you may already be invisible to the tools your customers are using.
They Said TikTok Was for Kids Dancing
Let's talk about TikTok, because this one is still within living memory and the people who got it wrong are still working in marketing.
When TikTok emerged as a serious platform, the dominant opinion among business owners, marketers, and brand managers was consistent: it's a platform for teenagers doing dance challenges. It has nothing to do with real business. Our customers aren't on there. We'll monitor it and revisit in a few years.
Here is what TikTok is in 2026. It has 1.88 billion monthly active users. 49% of all consumers now use it as a search engine, according to Adobe's latest data. For anyone under 30, that number exceeds 50% — meaning the majority of the next generation of consumers searches for products, services, restaurants, advice, and recommendations on TikTok before they search anywhere else. It overtook Google as the most visited web domain in 2021 and has not looked back.
The brands that dismissed it as a children's entertainment app in 2020 spent the following four years playing catch-up against competitors who were already there. Some of them are still catching up.
The platform did not change its nature. The people dismissing it changed nothing except their opinion — too late, and at cost.
If you're still unsure what authentic social media content actually looks like in practice, the answer is simpler than most people think.
Now Let's Talk About AI
You already know where this is going, so let's be honest about it.
The objections to AI are real. There is genuinely bad AI content online — generic, hollow, obviously machine-generated, published without thought or judgment. The term "AI slop" exists because the thing it describes is real. Some businesses are using AI tools poorly, producing content that erodes rather than builds trust. These are fair criticisms.
But here is the question those criticisms do not answer: was the first photograph good? Was the first digital camera image good? Was the first website good? Was the first iPhone app good? Was the first TikTok video a masterclass in content strategy?
Every tool in its earliest, most widespread adoption phase produces an enormous amount of bad output from people who don't yet know how to use it. That is not a property of the tool. That is a property of any new capability meeting a mass audience for the first time. The printing press produced centuries of misinformation alongside everything it gave us. The internet produced spam, scams, and dial-up speeds before it produced everything else.
The question has never been whether a new technology produces bad results in untrained hands. It always does. The question is whether the capability underneath it is real, is growing, and is changing what is possible.
On all three counts, AI answers yes, emphatically, with evidence.
92% of organisations are already using AI in at least one core business function in 2026. That number was not reached by accident or hype. It was reached because the businesses that adopted early saw real results — faster production, lower costs, higher quality output, capabilities that simply did not exist before. The gap between organisations using AI effectively and those that are not is now measurable, compounding, and widening every quarter.
97% of marketing leaders say AI literacy is now a mandatory skill for anyone working in marketing. Not useful. Not advisable. Mandatory.
The debate about whether AI is legitimate is the same debate Blockbuster was having about streaming, Nokia was having about touchscreens, and Kodak was having about pixels. It is a debate that history has already decided. The only open question is which side of that history you intend to be on.
The AI tools available to small businesses today would have cost tens of thousands just two years ago. That gap is only accelerating.
This Is Not a Criticism. It Is a Pattern.
The people who dismissed digital cameras, smartphones, streaming, and TikTok were not stupid. Most of them were highly experienced, commercially successful, and genuinely thoughtful. They were also human — meaning they were subject to the same bias that affects all of us when we are comfortable and things are working.
It is called commitment to the existing model. When your current approach generates revenue, reputation, and results, the case for changing it is psychologically difficult to make, regardless of what the evidence says. The discomfort of changing something that works almost always outweighs the abstract risk of being left behind — until the abstract risk becomes a very concrete reality, and by then the window has usually closed.
Nokia's engineers were right. Kodak's researchers were right. The people inside Blockbuster who saw Netflix as a genuine threat were almost certainly right. The institutions around them simply could not move fast enough to act on what they already knew.
That is the real lesson, and it is worth sitting with. The risk is rarely ignorance. The risk is knowledge without action.
Where Are You in This Story?
Every era of technological disruption has the same cast of characters. There are the early adopters who move fast, make mistakes, iterate, and end up owning the landscape. There are the pragmatic majority who watch carefully, adopt once the evidence is clear, and build competitive positions. And there are the holdouts, who have the most sophisticated arguments for waiting, and who tend to have the most to regret.
AI is not waiting for consensus. It is not pausing while the debate continues. The tools are improving every month. The businesses using them are getting faster, producing more, spending less, and reaching further. The gap is not standing still.
You do not have to love AI. You do not have to agree with every use of it. You are absolutely entitled to have standards for how it is used, to reject lazy or dishonest applications of it, and to demand quality from anything that carries your name.
But the question of whether to engage with it at all — that question was settled the moment Kodak's management said "don't tell anyone about it" and filed for bankruptcy thirty-seven years later.
History does not remember the people who waited until they were certain. It remembers the ones who moved while there was still time.
The meeting in Dallas is still happening, in a thousand different forms, in businesses all over the world right now. People are sitting across the table from the future and deciding whether to take it seriously.
You already know how that story ends.
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