Abandoned oil wells

Ten years ago Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes said he wasn’t worried about digital streaming. “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix,” he said. Blockbuster’s head of digital strategy echoed this sentiment, asserting the company was “strategically better positioned than almost anybody out there.” Not long after, Blockbuster went the way of the butter churn, while Netflix became a household fixture. Today, the movie streaming service is worth almost as much as Disney.

To most people, that’s a funny story about the hubris of a technological dinosaur. Imagine, however, if Blockbuster had been a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, that millions of people had been employed in the manufacture and sales of Jurassic Park DVDs, that there were hundreds of cities dotting the South and Midwest where brick-and-mortar video rental was the only job in town. Then, the collapse of Blockbuster wouldn’t […]