Learning From Kodak's Demise: What the end of a blue-chip company can teach us about the 2012 election.

Reason reports:

Unlike government and its sub-entities, Kodak couldn’t count on a guaranteed revenue stream: Consumers abandoned its products, and now the company is basically done. The history of private-sector duopolies and even monopolies is filled with such seemingly sudden disappearing acts: The A&P supermarket chain—if you’re under 40 years old, or from the West Coast, you probably haven’t even heard of it—enjoyed a U.S. market share of 75 percent as recently as the 1950s. Big-box music retailers and bookstores were supposed to bestride the land like colossi at the turn of our new century, but Virgin megastores have all but disappeared, and Borders has been liquidated. Dominant newspapers in one-paper towns were able to book some of the economy’s highest profit margins for four decades—more than 20 percent a year, on average, positively dwarfing such hated industrial icons as Walmart—yet with the explosion of Web-based competition, these onetime mints are now among the least attractive companies in the economy.

There is a positive correlation between an organization’s former dominance and its present inability to cope with 21st-century change. As technology business consultant Nilofer Merchant has aptly put it, “The Web turns old industries on their head. Industries that have had monopolies or highly profitable duopolies are the ones most likely to be completely gutted when a more powerful, more efficient system comes along.” We need to hasten the inevitable arrival of that more efficient system on the doorstep of America’s most stubborn, foot-dragging, reactionary sector—government at the local, state, and especially federal levels, and its officially authorized customer-hating agents, the Democrats and Republicans.

An article well worth your time.