Originally posted by beholder3 While that is true, it is too short and doesn't address the question "what to adapt to".
Sony did once adapt to change and they went down the brand new Betamax route ...
The issue with Betamax wasn't not adapting to change. Sony, already in the transistor TV business that RCA (remember that name?) wouldn't embrace because their new tube plant hadn't paid for itself yet, invented Betamax and refused to license it to the other companies diving into the surging interest in TV video recording. So Sony's competitors came up with a less expensive (and lower quality) scheme called VHS. I won't waste everyone's time on the merits of Betamax and and Sony's video recorder capabilities by the time the SL-2700 was manufactured, but rather than a Darwin example, as manifested by RCA, what occurred to Sony was a technology example of Gresham's Law: The bad drives out the good (originally applied to coinage).
In other news, Sony spent a lot of effort bringing R, G, and B OLEDs to some level of maturity for use in flat panel TVs. But LG has taken over most of that market by using single color OLEDs with white phosphors and color filters. Sony likely can never reach LG's manufacturing cost for an acceptable TV screen even if their emitters have better color purity.
The second mouse gets the cheese.