01Industrial Revolution era (late 18th – 19th century) — from stagecoach to railway
When the steam locomotive entered practical use in Britain and the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened in 1830, the transportation revolution exploded.
Railway investors and new ventures (George Stephenson and others). Mass transit and high speed accelerated entire industries. Distribution of raw materials and goods became dramatically efficient, lifting Britain into "the workshop of the world".
Traditional stagecoach operators, canal-transport companies, coaching inns, turnpike operators. Between Manchester and Liverpool, 29 stagecoaches ran daily before the railway opened — after, only 2. Industries breeding horses and related jobs collapsed all at once.
The same pattern recurred in the automobile revolution at the dawn of the 20th century. Of the 4,000+ buggy and carriage makers in the US around 1900, nearly all were gone 20 years later. Only one company successfully pivoted to automobiles.
Lesson — a technology that compresses physical "distance" neutralizes the entire pre-existing logistics network.
02The 1990s — Windows and the PC revolution
The shift from MS-DOS to Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 95 (1995) transformed the business environment.
Microsoft itself and PC-clone makers (Dell, Compaq). The open-GUI strategy seized market share explosively. Software developers concentrated on the Windows platform and monopolized the market.
IBM's typewriter division: electric typewriters (the Selectric series) had been the staple of the office through the 1980s. In 1991 the division was sold off to Lexmark — replaced wholesale by PCs + word processors (Word).
The fall of Wang Laboratories
Wang Laboratories, the king of dedicated word processors through the 1970s–80s, ran a high-margin proprietary-hardware model. IBM PCs plus low-cost emulation software (MultiMate) ate the market, and Wang collapsed sharply in the late 1980s. The pivot to PC came too late; the minicomputer-centric strategy backfired.
In Japan, the TRON OS project and the PC-98 series were also swallowed by the wave of Windows compatibility.
Lesson — software "compatibility" and falling prices destroy the dedicated machine's advantage in an instant.
03Other disruptive innovations (20th–21st century)
Kodak (1975 → 2013)
Blockbuster (2000s → 2010)
Nokia (early 2000s → 2013)
The thread running through all three is the "Innovator's Dilemma". Current success makes the organization reject the next disruptive technology — Clayton Christensen articulated the pathology in 1997.
04Three propositions on the essence of change
Proposition 1 — change is "disruptive", not "incremental"
Technology does not merely "replace" an existing industry; it redefines society's concepts of time, space, and labor. Railways redefined "distance". Windows/PC redefined "information processing". AI is redefining "knowledge labor". Falling behind carries the risk not of "decline" but of "extinction".
Proposition 2 — the key to adaptation is "the courage to discard vested interests" and "imagination for the future"
The more successful the company, the harder it tries to defend "the business making money today" — trapped by sunk-cost fallacy and fear. The winners invest with the resolve to "cannibalize themselves" and pivot flexibly. The gap is a mindset: change as opportunity, not threat.
Proposition 3 — the meaning of change is "the expansion of human possibility"
Stagecoach to railway, typewriter to PC — these were not "efficiency gains" but explosive expansions of human range of movement, access to knowledge, and creativity. The transition carries pain (unemployment, inequality). The real meaning is "the process of overcoming the pain and building a richer society".
05Re-asking the meaning of change
Today, we are mid-wave in the largest wave of all — AI.
- Are you (or your company) the side that clings to the stagecoach, or the side that switches to the railway?
- Like the companies that dismissed Windows in the 1990s as "an annoying new technology", are you seeing AI as "just a tool"?
- Will you "avoid" the pain of layoffs and obsolete skills, or convert it into "reskilling and the birth of new roles"?
History repeats. Those who fell behind did not "regret" — they "vanished". Only those who grasp the essence of change and keep asking can make the next era "their own".
06The AI wave in pharma — the resolve of being inside it
This site is educational material for the pharmaceutical industry. Within that frame, how is the AI wave acting?
In drug discovery, AlphaFold3 / OpenFold3 have made protein-structure prediction 1,000× faster; over 173 programs based on AI-designed candidates were in clinical trials at the start of 2026, with early Phase I success rates of 80–90% (vs. the historical 52%) (see AI and Emerging Technology📰 AI Daily News).
In material creation and promotional activity, drafting from AI prompts has become routine. As discussed in Prompt Commons, the need for a cross-industry place to share and refine prompts is becoming clear.
Regulatory work is changing too. In Ad Regulations and Material Review, AI is beginning to handle first-pass expression screening.
What does it mean to be on the "riding" side of this wave? Not "able to use AI", but standing at the level where one can "redefine, in one's own words, the meaning of the work that AI extends". Not the person who can write prompts — the person who can articulate "why this prompt is being written". Not the person who uses AI to make materials — the person who, even when using AI, ensures the "restraint that must still be kept".
07What do we discard, what do we switch to?
In the AI era, what should we discard and what should we switch to? Ask yourself this, now.
What to discard: the temperature of "we can wait and see how the AI wave develops a little longer". Kodak took 38 years to vanish, Blockbuster 13, Nokia 6. The wave keeps accelerating.
What to switch to: a mechanism that roots the premise of "working with AI" into every layer of the organization. Executives, middle management, the field — each able, in their own words, to speak about the quality that AI extends in their work. Only the organizations that reach that point will survive the next era.
Change is not something to fear. It is something to choose.
People who chose the stagecoach, and people who chose the railway. Companies that chose the typewriter, and companies that chose the PC. Kodak that chose film, and — well, Kodak didn't get the option to choose digital. Kodak simply chose not to choose anything other than film.
The lesson is that "not choosing" is itself a choice. The moment we choose to do nothing, we move to the side that gets carried by the current. Mid-wave in AI, what did you choose today? The integral of those small choices decides the view three years from now.