Smith Corona, a pioneer in the manufacture of portable manual typewriters went bankrupt in July 1995. Invented in1867by Christopher Latham Sholes, who also devised the universal keyboard (qwerty), the typewriter was innovative and revolutionary. Mark Twain was an early user, remarking. “It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around.” Like all inventions, the typewriter succeeded technically but it was not until it could be manufactured at lower cost reliably in the 1880’s that it succeeded commercially. Smith Corona was founded in 1886. By 1980 it had won half the global market.
Why did Smith Corona fail? Aiden McCullen puts out a good podcast and accompanying weekly article. In his September 2025 edition, he quoted Steve Jobs (1985) as saying people get stuck in comfortable ways of thinking “just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them”. Once a product or revenue formula works, they optimise it and double down introducing new features to grow incremental revenue. McCullen terms this ‘the monoculture of thought’ reinforcing conformity through structure, processes, rewards and hiring. This does not blind people to the future. They often do. But they are comfortable doing what they have always done.
In 1985, Smith Corona released the first electronic typewriter and personal word processor, but when typewriter sales began to shrink management doubled down to protect what they had, not where the future led. In 1993, their CEO insisted “Our core market, which is typewriters and word processors, will remain strong.” In hindsight, the CFO admitted “It [that decision] was a failure of vision, management vision.” As McCullen writes, technical mastery was their strength but it also imprisoned them when the market changed. Smith Corona lived by one product curve and died by it. Survival over time requires ambidexterity to see the future, and to invest almost all resources in it when the time comes. Optimising today is comparatively easy. Investing into the future when it appears uncertain is not.
The typewriter though had its moment. Robert J Samuelson (Washington Post, July 1995) noted that in 1870, 98% of all USA clerical workers were men. By 1920, 50% of all clerical workers were women. The typewriter created a demand for literate workers that could be filled most easily by women who at that time outnumbered men among high school graduates. By 1920, there were 615,000 typists. These jobs were also comparatively well paid In the 1890s, a typist could earn $6-$15 a week compared with $1.50-$8 a week for a factory worker. Today AI can do it for nix. Shift with the times or the times will shunt you aside.