How can a company that became a leading landline telephone brand in 1890's fumble its golden chance of dominating the mobile handset market so badly? The answer is most likely very simple: a long and successful history in a specific industry can fatally handicap a manufacturer when a device or a product morphs into a radically new form. In Ericsson's case, the company was able to make the leap from landline phones to analog mobile phones in 1980s - and then to digital mobile phones in 1990s - but it was unable to comprehend how the mobile phone started evolving rapidly from a voice device into a data device.

LM Ericsson started out as the Huawei of 1880s. Its crafty Swedish founder, Lars Magnus Ericsson, reverse engineered Siemens telephones and started manufacturing sleeker versions that undercut Siemens and Bell on pricing. It's worth noting that the Ericsson phones were not particularly innovative even back in 1890s.