To rudely condense history, IBM’s PC happened to Wang and the iPhone happened to BlackBerry. At a somewhat more nuanced level, however, what happened to both Wang and BlackBerry is that when the storm clouds appeared they did not take their competitors seriously, they failed to understood what their customers wanted on the new landscape, and finally and most unforgivably they thought they knew what was best for their customers better than the customers themselves. More specifically, both firms thought their core customers were mistaken—wrong—to express a preference for the new, inferior arrival:

[Wang’s] rise was so heady that [founder An ]Wang used to keep a chart in his desk that showed when he expected to overtake the mighty I.B.M. — sometime in the mid-1990s.

But then I.B.M. created its first personal computer, and that was the beginning of the end for Wang. He and his company stubbornly clung to the notion that the main thing people wanted from their computers was word processing; even after the company realized its error — by which time Wang had foolishly installed his son as chief executive — it always seemed to be a step behind. By 1992,Wang Laboratories was bankrupt, done in by competitors that understood that people wanted their computers to be more than glorified typewriters.

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BlackBerry’s co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and James Balsillie, simply didn’t take the iPhone seriously at first — just as An Wang didn’t take the personal computer seriously. After all, the iPhone had a touch screen that made it more difficult to write the kind of long, serious, work-related e-mails that BlackBerry users took for granted. The iPhone was a toy, they thought, and assumed that corporations would never let their employees use them on the job.

More than that, though, “BlackBerry had a huge installed base, and they were afraid to walk away from it,” said Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president with the Gartner Group. This is a problem that often plagues dominant companies. They are so concerned with playing defense — protecting what they have built — that they stand paralyzed as new competitors arise with business models they can’t, or won’t, replicate.

As it turns out, it was true that the iPhone made e-mailing a more cumbersome experience. But it did everything else so much better that it didn’t matter. People were willing to give up some of the ease of e-mail use for everything else iPhones provided. BlackBerry had long thought of itself as a company that provided mobile phone and wireless e-mail service. But Apple gave consumers a sense that they could have something more. In time, the iPhone became a more secure device, and technology officers succumbed to employee desires that they support it. The toy had become a tool.

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Was BlackBerry’s fall from grace inevitable? When you look at the history of dominant companies — starting with General Motors — it is easy enough to conclude yes. There are companies that occasionally manage to reinvent themselves. They are nimble and ruthless, willing to disrupt their own business model because they can sense a threat on the horizon. But they’re the exception.

Wang Laboratories is the rule. And so is BlackBerry.

The good news, then, for law firm leaders, is that today’s economy is enabling us to continue to live in our comfort zone.

The bad news: More’s the pity.