"The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch."

I think the lesson is to be continually re-evaluating the project to see if your assumptions still make sense given the current state of the market. This would be especially true for multi-year projects. It's basically the fallacy of sunk costs.