The case we published this week is The Birth of Sony (members only). I want to make a short, tangential observation about it.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/business-ecosystem-change
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/business-ecosystem-change
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@cedric great post! who are Maya and Lila?
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My friend’s two daughters 
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I don’t know how I stumbled upon this the first time today, but thanks for writing this! The long time horizon you observed is very relevant to the tech industry subsystem I work in, climate tech.
For example, our company sells SaaS to producers of cement and concrete that in theory helps them cut the CO2 emissions during the production process roughly in half. Doing that will also save them a lot of money from expensive materials and in markets where relevant, CO2 emissions certificates.
What we found is similar to what you described for the cassette recorders: Our customers love the demos but are often only willing to pay for small pilot projects initially. And these pilots often don’t demonstrate major improvements.
Not so much because our software doesn’t do what we promised, but because it takes significant process change in the plants to realize the benefits.
And that change is slow. The cement and concrete industry seems to be not used to changing their production processes and operates on very tight margins with little room for experimentation.
In some sense, we’re not just selling software, we’re selling ecosystem change without being aware of it. Given that’s we’re VC-funded, we experience significant tension between fast revenue growth targets and slow customer ecosystem change.
Your article helped me clarify why, despite all the hype in the last decade around how we have most of the technological solutions needed to avoid major climate disruption (from clean energy sources to electric transportation to heat pumps to electric steel furnaces), adoption of those is lagging way behind what would be needed to achieve the „mostly harmless“ amounts of planet heating identified in the IPCC scenarios.
The expectations of how quickly the respective ecosystems would change and adapt these technologies were simply way too optimistic and not based on historical precedents. 
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