Going Android

Yes, thanks for yet another rant and the usual list of recommended reading links. I don't think I disputed that disruptive technologies threaten successful companies, but maybe you already wanted to tell us this anyway and were looking to get it off your chest at the first opportunity.

I also like the way you redefine management incompetence and failure to execute to be effective management in a politicised culture so that burying projects under layers of time-wasting is actually seen as an effective way of focusing the company on its priorities. (Never mind that such projects, run correctly, should actually have been the top priority for the company.) I'm sure such management practices appealed to various Roman Emperors and to the average despot, but objectively it is an incompetent squandering of an organisation's resources and ability to compete at a level its size would suggest.

What will be of most interest to historians and business theorists is how a previously successful organisation whose recent success was supposedly founded on its management structure entered a period of decline and inaction. And we're talking about a company that was making stuff like cables and rubber products for most of its history, so you can spare us the lecture about disruption.