Kodak sold film. For most of the twentieth century, photographs meant buying a roll, shooting it, and paying Kodak again to develop it — a magnificent razor-and-blades business where every memory generated two sales. Kodak's own engineers built one of the earliest digital cameras. The company nonetheless struggled to move fast enough as photographs went digital and then moved into phones, and it eventually filed for bankruptcy protection.

Nokia spent decades as a Finnish maker of paper and rubber goods before becoming the best-known mobile phone brand on earth, with handsets famous for lasting years and surviving falls. Then the contest changed from hardware to software — app stores, touchscreens, ecosystems — and Nokia's answer arrived late.

Blockbuster rented video cassettes and DVDs from thousands of shops. Its business assumed a Friday evening ritual: drive there, browse, borrow, return. When films arrived by post and then simply appeared on screens, the habit dissolved, and the chain shrank to near nothing.

In India, Maggi noodles show a different arc. In 2015 regulators ordered the product off shelves over safety concerns, and it vanished nationwide. Later testing cleared it, the product returned, and it recovered much of its place in Indian kitchens.

❌ Myth: Kodak missed digital photography. ✅ Fact: Kodak helped invent it and sold digital cameras. What it struggled with was replacing an extraordinarily profitable film business with a much less profitable digital one — a money problem, not a knowledge problem.

The pattern in all four is worth holding on to: the technology or the shock was visible to everyone involved. What differed was how quickly each organisation could afford to change what it was.

Try it now — trace a brand that faded

Name a brand your parents used weekly that you never buy.
Write down what it really sold — the product, and the habit around it.
Write what replaced it, and what the replacement was better at.
Ask what the company would have had to give up in order to build that replacement itself.