Even if you know what is coming, that doesn't guarantee you can outmaneuver it. When you are dealing with thousands of people, contracts with hundreds to tens of thousand of customers, and infrastructure based on the assumptions that make your existing business tick, a fundamental change that costs a new competitor $0 to make because they don't have any of that built up stuff could costs a fortune for you to counter.

holding the place of an incumbent has advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes you can't leverage the advantages, and that's when a company can get buried by the upstart the worst.