[hueyp]

Yes, he was appointed dictator before the consulship of varro / paullus, but his strategy proved unpopular. It makes sense: identity is hard and slow to change, and the romans had a strong identity around aggressiveness.

That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.

[Attrecomet]

We could adapt the comparison and imagine Kodak realizing the digital business just enough to adapt a bit, but never shift their focus: Just enable digital photography to make the business case for any newcomer unviable, so they'll run out of money before they start to turn a profit, but not innovate enough to create the digital photography age we have today -- it would stay a niche market, for people for whom traditional film really wouldn't work, just like it was in the years leading up to the shift.

And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement. One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.

[zahlman]

Or we could take the real example of Philip Morris successfully adapting to the declining popularity of (and increasing legislation against) cigarette smoking and the approach they've taken to cannabis (in places where it's legal).

[sevensor]

Yeah, this was bad generalship, albeit on a much bigger scale than the Republic was used to. The Romans were no strangers to military disasters, but they were unusually resilient. The conquest of Italy was far from a sure thing, and it included numerous thrashings by the volscians, aequians, sabines, veiians, et al.