The Cannae Problem

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-cannae-problem/

by flobosg • 1 year ago

164 90 1 year ago

roenxi• 1 year ago

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.

hueyp• 1 year ago

Yes, he was appointed dictator before the consulship of varro / paullus, but his strategy proved unpopular. It makes sense: identity is hard and slow to change, and the romans had a strong identity around aggressiveness.

That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.

Attrecomet2• 1 year ago

We could adapt the comparison and imagine Kodak realizing the digital business just enough to adapt a bit, but never shift their focus: Just enable digital photography to make the business case for any newcomer unviable, so they'll run out of money before they start to turn a profit, but not innovate enough to create the digital photography age we have today -- it would stay a niche market, for people for whom traditional film really wouldn't work, just like it was in the years leading up to the shift.

And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement. One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.

sevensor2• 1 year ago

Yeah, this was bad generalship, albeit on a much bigger scale than the Republic was used to. The Romans were no strangers to military disasters, but they were unusually resilient. The conquest of Italy was far from a sure thing, and it included numerous thrashings by the volscians, aequians, sabines, veiians, et al.

soco• 1 year ago

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

ogogmad• 1 year ago

#NotAllDemocracies

More broadly, I think that Americans have been too arrogant and have been prone to thinking that the only part of the world which matters stops at their own borders.

readthenotes12• 1 year ago

In support of "democracy", some States tried to prevent Trump from being on the 2024 ballot--that is, to prevent the demos from selecting who they wanted.

There are several similar stories from Europe where the putatively democratically elected leaders are working to save the demos from itself.

So #NotAllDemocracies, but more than there should be

FredPret• 1 year ago

This is a natural consequence of:

- major oceans on two sides, very similar country on one side, and only one border with a truly different country

- 25% of the world's economy

- very easy to travel, work, and do business internally across the US

- some cultural and lots of climate diversity inside the US

All of which means you can live a very full and happy life without ever leaving the States or even thinking about what happens outside of it.

Qem• 1 year ago

That is happening in the energy sector. US owes a lot of its initial development surge to early oil exploration. But now China is making strides in green energy, fleet electrification and renewables deployment, while the big oil lobby acts like an anchor dragging US behind, hampering advance in those areas.

hangonhn2• 1 year ago

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.

inglor_cz• 1 year ago

Most important wars in the Ancient Mediterranean had a major naval component.

It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:

a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;

and

b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]

It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_(461)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Bon_(468)

hangonhn2• 1 year ago

This is so dang cool!!! No I didn’t know that the Vandals were more dangerous at sea. Thank you for sharing!!

johnnyjeans• 1 year ago

In my view, it was won because the Elder Council underestimated the threat. Had they known how the defense of Sicily was going to go, they could have easily afforded to hire 50,000 more celts and turned them out onto the Italic peninsula to raise absolute hell. But hindsight is 20/20.

The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.

The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.

primitivesuave2• 1 year ago

Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.

Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)

2mlWQbCK• 1 year ago

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?

yonisto2• 1 year ago

At the higher level (CEO) no one thought Windows 3.11 will succeed. So much so that even MS thought that OS/2 would do better (and it was technically superior). So neither Lotus nor WP were willing to invest in a windows version prior to the launch. It was not an inevitable outcome.

toast0• 1 year ago

WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 ran on many platforms, including Unix (I don't know which flavors).

I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.

There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.

Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.

hughw• 1 year ago

But you can't turn that into a business book and speaking engagements.

The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.

yonisto2• 1 year ago

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

myth_drannon• 1 year ago

I also thought about October '23 but also October '73. Iron Dome made the government (not idf) captive of "conception" and the multi billion dollar fence... The whole system was so fragile. Also the Yom Kippur war and the Bar-Lev line, same belief in powerful defence lines and captive of old concepts.

At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.

4ndrewl• 1 year ago

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

OhMeadhbh3• 1 year ago

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.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

they probably picked it up on the military boarding school most higher ups went to.

OhMeadhbh3• 1 year ago

One of the interesting things about the US military is the uniformity of training. There's an entire group in the Army called TRADOC, or Training and Doctrine Command. The US military is sort of slow to adopt new ideas, but once they do, TRADOC makes sure everyone gets them pounded into their heads. I haven't been in the Marines for close to 35 years, but I can still tell you what BAMCIS is an initialism for and could probably still call in a fire mission.

Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.

And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)

But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.

bob1029• 1 year ago

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.

topkai22• 1 year ago

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.

zahlman2• 1 year ago

but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end

There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.

jkmcf• 1 year ago

Rome only recovered because Hannibal didn't march on Rome.

cwmma• 1 year ago

Rome recovered because if its literally unmatched in the ancient world ability to recruit armies and put orders of magnitude more men in the field as a portion of their population.

Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.

vondur• 1 year ago

I thought that was due to him not having the equipment needed to carry out a successful siege. His strategy was to defeat the Roman Army in the field and then peel away their allies in the peninsula.

hodgesrm• 1 year ago

It's also worth noting that some of the Roman commanders were simply bad, and Hannibal himself was not without flaws.

The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.

Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.

These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath

acjohnson55• 1 year ago

Coincidentally, the excellent podcast, Tides of History, is currently doing a miniseries on the Punic Wars, and just covered why Cannae didn't end the war.

https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/season/5/?epPage=...

ithkuil4• 1 year ago

Also, Rome defeated Carthage when Hannibal was no longer a player

whakim• 1 year ago

The Romans were actually quite smart after Cannae; they had lost a bunch of pitched battles, so they decided to shadow Hannibal's army to make his foraging logistics much more complicated (and forcing him to stay close to Southern Italy where he could easily resupply). The logistics of attacking Rome were therefore challenging at best, and the Romans used this as a delaying tactic to score wins on other fronts (since they enjoyed an overall manpower advantage).

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

One of my favorite anecdotes my history teacher shared was of Hannibal marching to the undefended Rome, throwing a spear at the gates, and walking away under the logic that if Rome could just throw away that many soldiers at Cannae, just how many more did they leave back home to defend the city?

dijksterhuis• 1 year ago

hehe, and here i was thinking it was gonna be some scottish variant of the scunthorpe problem.

(cannae = cannot)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

"It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are."

She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".

This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.

makingstuffs• 1 year ago

I thought it was to do with the Scottish pronunciation of ‘cannot’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AStonesThrow• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is what Chief Engineer Scotty said every time Captain Kirk asked for the impossible: "I cannae give ye' any more, sir!" So I just thought we were going to max out the laws of physics again.

belmont_sup• 1 year ago

Unless the writing changed after you post this, but the writer certainly explains how Rome won after Fabius’s new strategy of attrition and “cowardly” tactics.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

"Blockbuster vs. Netflix: Blockbuster's leadership couldn't break free from their retail store mental model."

Silicon Valley cannot break free from its surveillance, data collection and online advertising mental model of the internet.

"It's that their past successes created the conditions for these mistakes. Their expertise became their vulnerability. Their conventional wisdom became the instrument of their downfall."

Ad services have been highly profitable in the absence of meaningful competition or regulation. But how long will those conditions last. Silicon Valley's "conventional wisdom" comprises "products" and "services" priced at zero dollars, "normalised" anti-competitive conduct, relentless data collection and surveillance and finally, the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".

"Disruptors and innovators intuitively understand the Cannae Problem. They specifically look for gaps between established organizations' mental models and reality. These gaps represent enormous opportunities."

The established "tech" organisations' mental models are so weak they were never able to find a business model. They had to resort to internet intermediation for the purpose of surveillance and advertising services.

DuckConference• 1 year ago

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.

immibis• 1 year ago

This is a link aggregator for founders of tech startups funded by venture capital - never forget it.

krispyfi• 1 year ago

And they are mischaracterizing the concept of "normalization of deviance".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

aidenn0• 1 year ago

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.

fellowniusmonk• 1 year ago

Also, if you know the inside ball on Netflix/Blockbuster then you've heard that blockbuster did massively fund a break into digital and streaming at a time that conceptually wasn't "too late" but Netflix was way ahead of them on classification systems and predicting lifetime customer ROI.

Netflix had cutting edge marketing automation teams that sabotaged every single dollar and every sales initiative by dumping low and _negative_ value consumers (dorm IP addresses, etc.) onto every single loss leader marketing initiative Blockbuster launched. They had "independent" free signup marketing flows for "free stuff" etc, and if they identified good clients they would be sent to Netflix, predicted "bad customers" they would actively send to blockbuster.

Netflix's "counter marketing" team was extremely successful. Indeed is a good example of a company that has had similar expertise in their org as well.

Oddly enough the short hand lesson people learn about blockbuster is both true and a slight of hand.

sevensor2• 1 year ago

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.

thesurlydev• 1 year ago

Where has this blog been all my life.

1minusp• 1 year ago

I thought this was about scots/scottish dialects.

cameldrv2• 1 year ago

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.

ithkuil4• 1 year ago

It's a lot about resilience to defeat.

Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.

That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.

The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.

pmontra2• 1 year ago

That was not the case for Vietnam vs the USA or for Afghanistan vs the Soviet Union. I'm both cases there were internal anti war movements, especially in the USA, and (for the smallest state) the resolve to outwill the largest one, no matter how many years and deaths it would take.

tintor• 1 year ago

Expensive in peace time.

In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.

Bearstrike• 1 year ago

This comment is correct as written: The U.S. is under-equipped with small UAS.

However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.

The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.

The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.

If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.

pmontra2• 1 year ago

It's probably "Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform" https://www.defense.gov/news/publications/

I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.

cameldrv2• 1 year ago

They may recognize that it's an issue, but the problem is going to be procurement and manufacturing. Ukraine is building FPV drones for about $500 each. A Switchblade 300, which is roughly comparable to these, costs $60,000.

At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.

parrit• 1 year ago

Action is more important than intent. I'm sure many at Kodak knew that digital was a threat too. Organisational resistance prevents knowledge turning into action.

karmakaze• 1 year ago

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'.

roxolotl• 1 year ago

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.

D-Coder• 1 year ago

Yes, "Reverse the polarity!" is not always going to be the right answer.

senderista• 1 year ago

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...

Thrymr• 1 year ago

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.

frutiger• 1 year ago

It's August 2, 216 BCE

Did August exist before Augustus?

jjmarr• 1 year ago

If the author said "Sextilis 2, 216 BCE" you wouldn't know it was late summer.

And BCE didn't exist before Jesus Christ (AD/BC was invented in 525). So the period-accurate translation is "Sextilis 2, the year of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro".

t435622• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

I had the fortune of being in one of the launch markets for Ricochet, which tried to sell a wireless modem back in the days of the Psion 5 and before GPRS was really a thing.

The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.

fch42• 1 year ago

Symbian was not quite as great as you describe it there. Asynchronous/message-passing-based alright but with a non-scaling message queue model (servers couldn't horizontally scale because there was only one request queue - you always had multiple clients hammering one singlethreaded server). The ability to scale I/O on Symbian (via shared mem/paging) came too late to benefit Nokia (who was extremely tardy at adopting newer Symbian releases ...), and no multi-core ARM-based phone ever ran Symbian. It only got multicore support in v9 (the last) anyway. Did I mention it didn't have an ARM64 port either (press releases notwithstanding)?

"Symbian C++" used to be a great search term ... for clubkiness horror stories. Or at least warnings that "don't expect this to be your pal's C++". Nevermind the kernel actually used a more crude form (a C++ "standard library" for kernel code is ... challenging). Definitely not "easy to read".

Symbian (and Nokia) recognised this to a degree; hence the "posix environment" or the Qt purchase. Symbian 9 was a great step towards scaling it. It only got into a phone ... with the last Symbian phone ever made. Bit of a pity - it could never really show what might have been.

They were steamrollered. Things just happened too fast for non-unix-kernel based systems to take the then-imminent multicore and 64bit ARM. Nevermind other misses like keyboard vs. touchscreen (Symbian UIQ was rather nice to use but nokia's S60 was not). Or in Nokia's case, not going all-in on Maemo/Meego.

(yes, been there. Only at its tail end, and only stayed as long as I did because in 2009, the job market wasn't great. Nonetheless, I remember a few things - great, sad and stupid. Symbian had all of that and then some. And definitely, Nokia also had a few "Varros").

t435622• 1 year ago

After rereading my posting below it's a lot of long-winded blah. My short answer is that IMO a huge portion of the technical problems were recognised and attempts made to solve them but it was impossible because the business failed to adjust its own strategy to something that was achievable.

[Here followeth the guff]

IMO the asyncronous API on Symbian was elegant and simple whereas on Linux it's a confusing messy disaster and to make async keywords work in a modern browser one has to use libraries like libuv to fake bits of it or insulate you from the many 1/2 useful event or polling APIs. I thought the Symbian file server had threads but I admit I'm not a great expert on any of that. I do think that you could have fixed those problems and every app would have continued working but better whereas in Linux you can do whatever you want and most software still won't benefit from it.

Symbian C++ was just C++ with an active object model to handle asynchronous events and the insistence that a program must not crash just because it runs out of memory (which made 2-phase constructors a thing and caused the reimplementation of the new operator to return NULL if memory allocation failed rather than raise an exception). Those 2 constraints alone made it a nightmare. One has to ask oneself why it was so critical to not fail when memory allocation fails - how many programs can realistically continue to do useful things when there's no memory for them?

The Active Object thing which turned your program into one big series of event handlers was a misery IMO. The whole platform was crying out for co-routines.

I never looked at Apples approach to memory allocation failures but I think they probably just decided to add enough memory to the phone and boo-hoo if something went wrong. They saved state and let you restore so it looked almost as if the thing hadn't crashed.

All the other things you mention are true but there are root causes for it and one of them is the attempt to develop too much software for too many hardware types leading to too many bugs and then architecting the build system such that it could not scale.

I was on the team that rewrote the build system (a huge mistake BTW because it took too long). The Nokia build produced 85GB of output. After a lot of effort we got it down to 12h with a huge build cluster of 100s of machines and on a good day where nothing broke. A large part of that build was the same code getting recompiled with different options for alternate phone models. Most of the build was only able to build with RVCT. Compiler updates were very risky because all compilers have bugs and on a large codebase they get exposed somewhere or other. Compare to android where a 16core machine can build it in the order of an hour or even less perhaps - and most of that build is compiling Java to bytecode so it never has to be done more than once.

I have forgotten a lot but IIRC we really crushed the compilation and linking phase but packaging was done in a stupid way - into huge packages that are nothing like Linux ones and a couple of the largest ones of these tied up the build on one cluster node for a long time

In fact the whole linux packaging system itself offered the possibility of NOT recompiling the whole system repeatedly, but I worked on OBS after this and total rebuilds were more common than one might wish to believe. I still think it would have been better than the lunacy we were engaged in.

The clusters were still overburdened because there wasn't just one build to run on them - older versions of the OS still had to be rebuilt for updates for example. Also adding language support required a rebuild - IMO if one wants to consider design mistakes this and the use of the DLL format rather than .SO were the biggest unrecognised balls-ups.

DLLs are very unpleasant for compatibility because if you change the number of methods in a class it can destroy compatibility. the schemes for getting around this were horrible and just seemed to be unreliable (freezing).

The rest of the technical problems - almost all of them - were very adversely affected by this constipated system and it existed because of the decisions:

  1) To make a lot of models with different hardware in them and more/less RAM.
  2) To reduce component count - saving 50c here and there which had worked extremely well for Nokia in the past before those StrongARM and similar chips came out that created a big jump in ARM performance.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

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.

zelos• 1 year ago

That’s a special case of the general strategy of defeat in detail I think?

w10-1• 1 year ago

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.)

chasil• 1 year ago

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...

primitivesuave2• 1 year ago

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.

ArthurStacks• 1 year ago

Written by someone utterly clueless

psychoslave• 1 year ago

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.

YeGoblynQueenne• 1 year ago

> 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.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

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

The Cannae Problem

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