Why opportunities look obvious only afterward

2.1 Why some people see an opportunity where others see only change

“If only I'd known.” Almost everyone has said it. If only I had known that industry would take off, I would have entered sooner. If only I had known how large that company would become, I would have taken the opportunity. If only I had known that role would disappear, I would have changed direction earlier.

Usually, by the time we say this, the answer has arrived. The once-obscure industry is booming. The rough early technology is part of daily life. Later results have connected the scattered developments into a clear line. From the vantage point of the outcome, the past looks unusually obvious. But turn back the clock and remove everything we subsequently learned. Would the opportunity still be so clear?

More than 20 years ago, a family wanting to watch a film on a weekend evening might naturally have gone to a neighborhood video store, chosen a disc, taken it home, and returned it afterward. Shops, inventory, discs, rentals, returns: every part of the arrangement had existed for years. Once a way of life becomes stable, we forget that it is a solution suited to particular conditions, rather than the way the world must be.

The internet was changing those conditions. Connections were getting faster, more households had computers, and people were becoming accustomed to shopping, reading news, and finding information online. Activities that once required a physical visit were moving onto the internet. None of this was hidden. Netflix inhabited the same world as everyone else. Its early proposition was straightforward: choose DVDs online and receive them by mail.

It is easy to retell this as a triumph of foresight, as though someone knew that streaming would inevitably follow. That certainty was unavailable at the time. DVDs still sold. Rental stores still existed, customers still visited, and the old model still made money. When a new world begins to appear, the old one has usually not disappeared. That overlap makes change particularly easy to misread.

The difficult question was not whether you had noticed faster internet. Plenty of people had. It was what you thought that change was connected to. You could observe that the network was faster, online viewing more convenient, and consumers had another entertainment option. All were reasonable observations.

But ask another question. What if a film no longer had to arrive on a disc? What if customers could see what they wanted without first going to a shop, finding the disc, and carrying it home? Then the implications extended beyond viewing habits. Stores, inventories, distribution, returns, and the costs and commercial relationships built around them could all change.

There was still no answer from the future proving that streaming would succeed. A condition previously taken for granted was beginning to look less permanent. That was what could be recognized.