The smartest players go with the flow
“As an industry changes, the smartest players go with the flow, dropping their historical ties to make a leap in the dark. If you were in the business of selling music via shiny silvery discs (having moved on from black vinyl discs), for example, you had a window of opportunity to make money packaging those tracks as little data files and selling those instead (see: Apple iTunes). Today, you probably want to be thinking more like Spotify, leasing songs on a streaming basis. But if you ignored those early warning signs about how music consumption was changing, you risked going the way of the dinosaurs -- hence Apple getting into the streaming business itself.
In a famous 1960 Harvard Business Review article, Theodore Levitt wrote about horse-buggy whip makers, suggesting that if they'd regarded themselves as suppliers to the personal-transport industry rather than focusing on their specific product, they would have had a Darwinistic chance of evolving. BP isn't really in the oil industry; it's in the providing-whatever-kind-of-energy-people-need-to-get-from-A-to-B business. Given the increased attention being paid to batteries as a way to store and transport energy from geographically dependent sources such as wave power, Tesla would put BP at the forefront of emerging technologies that are the modern-day equivalent of that Persian discovery in 1908.” -Mark Gilbert
Link: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-21/oil-giant-bp-should-buy-tesla-from-elon-musk
