It's also worth noting that some of the Roman commanders were simply bad, and Hannibal himself was not without flaws.

The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.

Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.

These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath

hehe, and here i was thinking it was gonna be some scottish variant of the scunthorpe problem.

(cannae = cannot)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...

>but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end

There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.

Unless the writing changed after you post this, but the writer certainly explains how Rome won after Fabius’s new strategy of attrition and “cowardly” tactics.

"Blockbuster vs. Netflix: Blockbuster's leadership couldn't break free from their retail store mental model."

Silicon Valley cannot break free from its surveillance, data collection and online advertising mental model of the internet.

"It's that their past successes created the conditions for these mistakes. Their expertise became their vulnerability. Their conventional wisdom became the instrument of their downfall."

Ad services have been highly profitable in the absence of meaningful competition or regulation. But how long will those conditions last. Silicon Valley's "conventional wisdom" comprises "products" and "services" priced at zero dollars, "normalised" anti-competitive conduct, relentless data collection and surveillance and finally, the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".

"Disruptors and innovators intuitively understand the Cannae Problem. They specifically look for gaps between established organizations' mental models and reality. These gaps represent enormous opportunities."

The established "tech" organisations' mental models are so weak they were never able to find a business model. They had to resort to internet intermediation for the purpose of surveillance and advertising services.

I thought it was to do with the Scottish pronunciation of ‘cannot’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rome only recovered because Hannibal didn't march on Rome.

"It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are."

She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".

This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.

Symbian was not quite as great as you describe it there. Asynchronous/message-passing-based alright but with a non-scaling message queue model (servers couldn't horizontally scale because there was only one request queue - you always had multiple clients hammering one singlethreaded server). The ability to scale I/O on Symbian (via shared mem/paging) came too late to benefit Nokia (who was extremely tardy at adopting newer Symbian releases ...), and no multi-core ARM-based phone ever ran Symbian. It only got multicore support in v9 (the last) anyway. Did I mention it didn't have an ARM64 port either (press releases notwithstanding)?

"Symbian C++" used to be a great search term ... for clubkiness horror stories. Or at least warnings that "don't expect this to be your pal's C++". Nevermind the kernel actually used a more crude form (a C++ "standard library" for kernel code is ... challenging). Definitely not "easy to read".

Symbian (and Nokia) recognised this to a degree; hence the "posix environment" or the Qt purchase. Symbian 9 was a great step towards scaling it. It only got into a phone ... with the last Symbian phone ever made. Bit of a pity - it could never really show what might have been.

They were steamrollered. Things just happened too fast for non-unix-kernel based systems to take the then-imminent multicore and 64bit ARM. Nevermind other misses like keyboard vs. touchscreen (Symbian UIQ was rather nice to use but nokia's S60 was not). Or in Nokia's case, not going all-in on Maemo/Meego.

(yes, been there. Only at its tail end, and only stayed as long as I did because in 2009, the job market wasn't great. Nonetheless, I remember a few things - great, sad and stupid. Symbian had all of that and then some. And definitely, Nokia also had a few "Varros").

I had the fortune of being in one of the launch markets for Ricochet, which tried to sell a wireless modem back in the days of the Psion 5 and before GPRS was really a thing.

The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.

Yes, he was appointed dictator before the consulship of varro / paullus, but his strategy proved unpopular. It makes sense: identity is hard and slow to change, and the romans had a strong identity around aggressiveness.

That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.

Most important wars in the Ancient Mediterranean had a major naval component.

It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:

a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;

and

b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]

It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_(461)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Bon_(468)

In my view, it was won because the Elder Council underestimated the threat. Had they known how the defense of Sicily was going to go, they could have easily afforded to hire 50,000 more celts and turned them out onto the Italic peninsula to raise absolute hell. But hindsight is 20/20.

The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.

The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.

Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.

Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)

they probably picked it up on the military boarding school most higher ups went to.

This comment is correct as written: The U.S. is under-equipped with small UAS.

However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.

The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.

The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.

If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.

It's a lot about resilience to defeat.

Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.

That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.

The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.

Expensive in peace time.

In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.

At the higher level (CEO) no one thought Windows 3.11 will succeed. So much so that even MS thought that OS/2 would do better (and it was technically superior). So neither Lotus nor WP were willing to invest in a windows version prior to the launch. It was not an inevitable outcome.

WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 ran on many platforms, including Unix (I don't know which flavors).

I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.

There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.

Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.

But you can't turn that into a business book and speaking engagements.

The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.

That is happening in the energy sector. US owes a lot of its initial development surge to early oil exploration. But now China is making strides in green energy, fleet electrification and renewables deployment, while the big oil lobby acts like an anchor dragging US behind, hampering advance in those areas.

#NotAllDemocracies

More broadly, I think that Americans have been too arrogant and have been prone to thinking that the only part of the world which matters stops at their own borders.

That’s a special case of the general strategy of defeat in detail I think?

I also thought about October '23 but also October '73. Iron Dome made the government (not idf) captive of "conception" and the multi billion dollar fence... The whole system was so fragile. Also the Yom Kippur war and the Bar-Lev line, same belief in powerful defence lines and captive of old concepts.

At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.

[flagged]

This is a link aggregator for founders of tech startups funded by venture capital - never forget it.

And they are mischaracterizing the concept of "normalization of deviance".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

If the author said "Sextilis 2, 216 BCE" you wouldn't know it was late summer.

And BCE didn't exist before Jesus Christ (AD/BC was invented in 525). So the period-accurate translation is "Sextilis 2, the year of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro".

Yes, "Reverse the polarity!" is not always going to be the right answer.

Also, if you know the inside ball on Netflix/Blockbuster then you've heard that blockbuster did massively fund a break into digital and streaming at a time that conceptually wasn't "too late" but Netflix was way ahead of them on classification systems and predicting lifetime customer ROI.

Netflix had cutting edge marketing automation teams that sabotaged every single dollar and every sales initiative by dumping low and _negative_ value consumers (dorm IP addresses, etc.) onto every single loss leader marketing initiative Blockbuster launched. They had "independent" free signup marketing flows for "free stuff" etc, and if they identified good clients they would be sent to Netflix, predicted "bad customers" they would actively send to blockbuster.

Netflix's "counter marketing" team was extremely successful. Indeed is a good example of a company that has had similar expertise in their org as well.

Oddly enough the short hand lesson people learn about blockbuster is both true and a slight of hand.