This is a very salient point that ALL INVESTORS should understand. Why?
A few years ago, everyone was ringing the death knell of books as a result of electronic books.
A few years ago, everyone was saying that disk drives would quickly go away quickly in favor of solid state drives. While the solid state world is growing, there is still a high demand for disk drives. Depending on the application, not everyone needs high expense SSD's. Building products with storage requires attention to component costs. When SSD and disk drives are closer in price, there may be much quicker adoption.
A few months ago, everyone said Amazon was taking over the bricks and mortar retailers. Last week Walmart bounced up 10% because of its strategy in the e-commerce space.
The point is change is evolutionary not revolutionary. The competitive response will also be a dynamic to consider. Change will always come, but the pace and the degree of change is not binomial. There will almost always be people who don't "go with the crowd" for one reason or another. So, there could be a ceiling to certain types of changes.
Can anyone say "records" or "vaccum tubes" ?!
