validating Mark
Twain’s line, “History doesn’t repeat itself—but it does rhyme.” Had the
music company executives been focused on the outside of their companies—
studying, analyzing, and innovating what their customers found valuable—
they could have invested many millions into productive research and development
rather than throwing away that sum down the judicial sinkhole. Yet
the Napster saga is just one in a long history of revolutions taking place outside
the confines of an existing industry, in what the Austrian economist
Joseph Schumpeter labeled “creative destruction.” The reason entire indus-