During Blockbuster's heyday, a construction worker of new Blockbuster stores foretold their future perfectly. Even the hard hats saw that one coming. But a pivot is the same as starting a new business from the ground up, and like all startups, that normally has a 90% failure rate. Blockbuster's failure was pretty much as expected.
But they had a very strong brand name, which would’ve given them a huge advantage. They could’ve just stopped the VHS and moved there operations to large regional warehouses and use the web as their storefront to mail CDs out. They could’ve eventually had their own movie app. They just didn’t seem to have visionaries on their board with enough voice to see the methods of their business were changing. Sometimes, the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule comes back to bite us.