Polaroid Blindsided!
In October 2001 Polaroid filed for bankruptcy. The company that came to define instant photography was blindsided by the rapid rise of digital photography...

UK Chocolate Bar Makers Blindsided!
For the first time in 50 years, sales of chocolate bars in the UK fell in 2001 by £150 million! What was the reason? Kids are spending more of their pocket money on mobile phone top-up cards...

18 Year Old Blindsides a $40B Industry
In 1999 18 year old Shawn Fanning released a program called Napster which changed forever the profit model of the recording industry and the way music is distributed...

Next Generation P2P Blindsides Hollywood
The second generation peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs, such as KaZaA, Morpheus and Gnutella based services, allow users not just to share audio files but videos and whole movies...

Hollywood was blindsided by Video Tape
In 1976 Universal and Disney sued Sony over the VCR, alleging that it allowed consumers to violate copyright...In 2001, over 70 per cent of Hollywood studio revenues come from rentals...

VoIP in Nepal
There is only one telco in Nepal - and the rate for a call from Katmandu to Toronto was 300 rupees a minute. I went to an Internet café, logged onto a web site and called North America for free! This standard called VoIP, voice over Internet Protocol, is radically changing the telecom industry.

FedEx vs. Moore
FedEx will not have to answer over 700,000 phone calls today, hasn't had to hire 20,000 additional people even though package volumes have grown, and last year didn't have to pay to print two billion forms! But the impact on form makers has been horrendous...

Internet Bubble
From its peak of 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ composite index fell to a low of 1,387.06 on September 21, 2001, losing well over $6 trillion in capitalization - equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the US gross domestic product. Was the crash foreseeable?

September 11
The US was blindsided on September 11, 2001 when two commercial airlines crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, killing over 3,000 people. The effects were catastrophic, and total insurance claims are estimated at $40 billion. Was it foreseeable?

Airlines and 9/11
As a result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent plummet in airline travel, airlines worldwide lost $12 billion in 2001 and will lose an estimated $6 billion in 2002...

INS Issues Visa to Dead Terrorists
Exactly six months after Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sent letters to their Florida flight school approving their visas. How did this happen?

Ice vs. Refrigeration
During the late 1800s in Canada and the northern US, we kept our food cold in iceboxes. Men cut blocks of ice and delivered it to homes and businesses. But when refrigeration was developed, none of the ice companies survived. Why not? We can learn from this...

If Books Were Like TV…
Imagine you were only allowed to read a book between 8:00 and 9:00 on Wednesday evenings and you couldn't get up to go to the bathroom until you had finished the chapter! Sound absurd? Isn't that how we watch TV? New technology promises to liberate consumers from being slaves to network time tables...

Microsoft blindsided!
Microsoft was blindsided by the rise of the Web. Netscape Navigator was being downloaded at a rate of one million copies a month and on November 16, 1995. Until December 7, 1995 it looked like Microsoft would become irrelevant in the Internet Age...

Blockbuster vs. Streaming
In 2001 roughly 30 per cent of Blockbuster's revenue came from late fees charged to customers. What happens to Blockbuster when customers can get video digitally streamed to their homes?