GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways “Better” doesn’t mean “replaced” — real constraints slow every switch you think is obvious.
Incumbents stick around because the cost of leaving them is messier than any spreadsheet shows.
Don’t argue which side wins — figure out what it would actually take for the switch to happen.
If you zoom out far enough, substitution always sounds clean.
Coal is old. Natural gas is new. So people say, “There are these new, more efficient natural gas generators. Let’s get all the coal off the grid and get these natural gas units there instead.”
And if you’ve ever been inside a real system, you already know what happens next: it doesn’t work like that.
What looks like a simple upgrade is usually a tradeoff. It’s substitution under constraints. And I care about this because leaders make the same mistake in business all the time, especially when capital and attention move faster than people expect. They treat substitution like a head-to-head comparison when, in practice, it’s a curve.
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