The future is easy to predict. It’s the detail that makes or kills you.

Everyone in the early 2000s could see the smartphone wave coming. The idea that our lives would move to a small screen in our pocket was inevitable. Analysts wrote about it. Telcos built for it. Investors piled in.

And if you’d asked who would dominate this future, the answers were obvious. Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry. They had 90% market share, billions in R&D, and global distribution. They’d already won.

Then Apple, a struggling computer company, walked in from the sidelines. And Google, an internet search engine, gave away the operating system that would power billions of devices.