From the title, I thought this article was going to be about how Hannibal won an incredible number of victories in the Second Punic War, but Carthage still lost the war and had to take devasting terms of surrender.

It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.

Symbian's Operating System really was superior. After all it was fully multitasking and all operating system calls were asynchronous. And it was written in C++ so the inside of the operating system was object oriented and easy to understand.

The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.

The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.

Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.

This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.

There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.

> Rome's eventual strategy—the Fabian strategy of delay, harassment, and avoiding direct confrontation—wasn't intuitive to Romans. It felt wrong.

My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.

> The mighty armies of Carthage? Sent packing in the First Punic War.

The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.

I used to talk about this at IBM, though mostly couched in the phrase "we have become an organization optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."

And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)

It's good to see this tradition persist.

So they went from "The strategy can win it" to "The strategy cannae win it"?

>> Except it wasn't. Hannibal's retreating center was deliberate. As the Romans pushed deeper, Hannibal's stronger forces on the flanks held firm, then gradually enveloped the Roman formation. The Roman army found itself surrounded, packed so densely that many couldn't even raise their weapons. What followed was slaughter on an industrial scale.

It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincer_movement

Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.

NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusions

To be honest, though I'm Greek, far from feeling flattered about the high morale of my ancestors I just find the explanation hard to believe.

The business side of this is largely a retelling of The Innovator's Dilemma: large successful businesses often struggle to adapt to nimble challengers that can innovate in ways that are structurally very difficult in the larger org.

I see this with the U.S. military today. If you look at what has happened in the last year in Ukraine, the Ukranians are building about 250,000 drones a month. I'm not sure the U.S. military would prevail against such a force. The U.S. has some very nice drones, but in quantities that are hundreds of times less, due to extremely expensive military procurement.

Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own the market for word processors and spreadsheets?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and the overarching point is certainly valid (that complacency has led to some notable corporate collapses). However, for purely pedagogical reasons, I have some critique of the Punic War analogy:

- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.

- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.

- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!

- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.

If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.

I would say science and why not also democracy are having their Cannae moment right now. And it's painful to watch...

> Roman soldiers fought in a checkerboard formation, with the front line engaging the enemy, then cycling to the back to rest while the next line moved forward. This rotation system allowed Romans to maintain constant pressure while preventing fatigue.

The first thing that comes to mind is StarCraft2 Stalker blink micro. They have shields that regenerate over time, so the front wave fights until shields are low then fall back to recharge.

The 2nd part is also covered by general SC2 tactics, concave fronts increase attacking numbers more than convex defenders'.

> Their mental maps of how battles should unfold were so ingrained that they couldn't recognize when the territory had changed.

This feels like the core aspect of most bad leadership I've experienced.

Organizations can turn on a dime, even very large ones, if leadership allows themselves to recognize and adapt to the new terrain.

The central challenge with this is that the adaptation process is painful, often requiring a 1v1 contest to the death with one's own ego.

I don’t play milsim but I do play Age of Wonders and find the oblique order works better.

Hannibal put his strongest units on both flanks. Frederick the Great put more units on one flank, and when that broke they crushed sideways along that end of the formation. Unzippering the entire front line. It also, I suspect, put the opposing general in mortal danger sooner, since he now has to retreat when the battle is only half over.

Having your strongest on one end means you can’t get separated into two groups. Unlike a game with an omniscient general you risk losing communication with half your army if things go poorly.

But it’s more common in games, where the general is omniscient and fatigue does not exist (so running across the map takes time but not energy), to see the lines fall back at a diagonal, forcing the enemy to chase down the far end of the formation, while it falls back to the center and the center joins the flank. By the time the battle is fully joined, the overmatched flank is nearly defeated, and the formations can roll up on the enemy’s center within a turn or two, while the rest stalls for time.

> Kodak and digital photography: Kodak actually invented the first digital camera in 1975. But the company was so committed to its film business model that it couldn't adapt its thinking when digital technology began to take over.

The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).

Jobs did it anyway.

This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-agony...

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/microsoft-asked-appl...

October 7 comes to mind. The Israelis had almost all the data about the attack but convinced themselves it will not happen.

What the fuck is happening? How is some "what the spanish inquisition taught me about SAAS sales" linkedin spam getting near the top of the HN feed?

Also the author's knowledge of roman history seems to be to the level of a summary of an inaccurate youtube video.

Strengths are weaknesses insofar as they bias you against building alternative capabilities. This is true on the personal level as well.

As for military red teams, a more relevant example might be from Japan in the 1980's: when they did product development, they set up distinct groups that had to take different approaches and compete for the chance to be the ultimate product.

The difficulty with taking this too far is anxiety, undifferentiated fear, splitting focus and attenuating priorities. That drains you and makes you ineffective. Players too weak to confront you directly sow discord in your ranks. That brings us back to questions of loyalty and validating that the critical perspective is being adopted in good faith. (Sadly all at work today in the US.)

I think the Sicilian Expedition would have better served the point here. Cannae is a disaster, but the Republic bounces back. Syracuse was a point of no return for Athens.

The article does mention that possibly one can't escape this issue totally.

But with incompleteness theorem we have a far stronger statement, that no matter how expressive the model space, there are possibilities that it will eventually encounter in its use and that it won't let anticipate. Well it doesn't say exactly that in that terms, but that's a rather straight forward interpretation of it.

I thought this was about scots/scottish dialects.

> It's August 2, 216 BCE

Did August exist before Augustus?

One thing that’s difficult about this is knowing if accepting a differing strategy than orthodoxy will actually be successful. Absolutely effort should be put into breaking out of the Cannae Problem but it’s easy to fall into a reverse trap where simply because something is unorthodox it must mean it’s the solution to the current challenge.

Coincidentally, this morning I listened to a podcast that tries to take a first-person POV on this battle:

https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-expe...

The mention of Blockbuster/Netflix reminds me of a series of articles that was posted on HN about a decade ago, but I can't find now. The thesis was that the demise of Blockbuster was overdetermined, and it was floundering long before Netflix got any degree of popularity.

Written by someone utterly clueless

Och, laddie, the problem wi' Cannae is ye cannae see it comin'!

Where has this blog been all my life.