From the title, I thought this article was going to be about how Hannibal won an incredible number of victories in the Second Punic War, but Carthage still lost the war and had to take devasting terms of surrender.
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
It's also worth noting that some of the Roman commanders were simply bad, and Hannibal himself was not without flaws.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
Coincidentally, the excellent podcast, Tides of History, is currently doing a miniseries on the Punic Wars, and just covered why Cannae didn't end the war.
The Romans were actually quite smart after Cannae; they had lost a bunch of pitched battles, so they decided to shadow Hannibal's army to make his foraging logistics much more complicated (and forcing him to stay close to Southern Italy where he could easily resupply). The logistics of attacking Rome were therefore challenging at best, and the Romans used this as a delaying tactic to score wins on other fronts (since they enjoyed an overall manpower advantage).
One of my favorite anecdotes my history teacher shared was of Hannibal marching to the undefended Rome, throwing a spear at the gates, and walking away under the logic that if Rome could just throw away that many soldiers at Cannae, just how many more did they leave back home to defend the city?
Unless the writing changed after you post this, but the writer certainly explains how Rome won after Fabius’s new strategy of attrition and “cowardly” tactics.
"Blockbuster vs. Netflix: Blockbuster's leadership couldn't break free from their retail store mental model."
Silicon Valley cannot break free from its surveillance, data collection and online advertising mental model of the internet.
"It's that their past successes created the conditions for these mistakes. Their expertise became their vulnerability. Their conventional wisdom became the instrument of their downfall."
Ad services have been highly profitable in the absence of meaningful competition or regulation. But how long will those conditions last. Silicon Valley's "conventional wisdom" comprises "products" and "services" priced at zero dollars, "normalised" anti-competitive conduct, relentless data collection and surveillance and finally, the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".
"Disruptors and innovators intuitively understand the Cannae Problem. They specifically look for gaps between established organizations' mental models and reality. These gaps represent enormous opportunities."
The established "tech" organisations' mental models are so weak they were never able to find a business model. They had to resort to internet intermediation for the purpose of surveillance and advertising services.
Yeah, this is what Chief Engineer Scotty said every time Captain Kirk asked for the impossible: "I cannae give ye' any more, sir!" So I just thought we were going to max out the laws of physics again.
Rome recovered because if its literally unmatched in the ancient world ability to recruit armies and put orders of magnitude more men in the field as a portion of their population.
Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
I thought that was due to him not having the equipment needed to carry out a successful siege. His strategy was to defeat the Roman Army in the field and then peel away their allies in the peninsula.
"It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are."
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
Symbian's Operating System really was superior. After all it was fully multitasking and all operating system calls were asynchronous. And it was written in C++ so the inside of the operating system was object oriented and easy to understand.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
Symbian was not quite as great as you describe it there. Asynchronous/message-passing-based alright but with a non-scaling message queue model (servers couldn't horizontally scale because there was only one request queue - you always had multiple clients hammering one singlethreaded server). The ability to scale I/O on Symbian (via shared mem/paging) came too late to benefit Nokia (who was extremely tardy at adopting newer Symbian releases ...), and no multi-core ARM-based phone ever ran Symbian. It only got multicore support in v9 (the last) anyway. Did I mention it didn't have an ARM64 port either (press releases notwithstanding)?
"Symbian C++" used to be a great search term ... for clubkiness horror stories. Or at least warnings that "don't expect this to be your pal's C++". Nevermind the kernel actually used a more crude form (a C++ "standard library" for kernel code is ... challenging). Definitely not "easy to read".
Symbian (and Nokia) recognised this to a degree; hence the "posix environment" or the Qt purchase. Symbian 9 was a great step towards scaling it. It only got into a phone ... with the last Symbian phone ever made. Bit of a pity - it could never really show what might have been.
They were steamrollered. Things just happened too fast for non-unix-kernel based systems to take the then-imminent multicore and 64bit ARM. Nevermind other misses like keyboard vs. touchscreen (Symbian UIQ was rather nice to use but nokia's S60 was not). Or in Nokia's case, not going all-in on Maemo/Meego.
(yes, been there. Only at its tail end, and only stayed as long as I did because in 2009, the job market wasn't great. Nonetheless, I remember a few things - great, sad and stupid. Symbian had all of that and then some. And definitely, Nokia also had a few "Varros").
After rereading my posting below it's a lot of long-winded blah. My short answer is that IMO a huge portion of the technical problems were recognised and attempts made to solve them but it was impossible because the business failed to adjust its own strategy to something that was achievable.
[Here followeth the guff]
IMO the asyncronous API on Symbian was elegant and simple whereas on Linux it's a confusing messy disaster and to make async keywords work in a modern browser one has to use libraries like libuv to fake bits of it or insulate you from the many 1/2 useful event or polling APIs. I thought the Symbian file server had threads but I admit I'm not a great expert on any of that. I do think that you could have fixed those problems and every app would have continued working but better whereas in Linux you can do whatever you want and most software still won't benefit from it.
Symbian C++ was just C++ with an active object model to handle asynchronous events and the insistence that a program must not crash just because it runs out of memory (which made 2-phase constructors a thing and caused the reimplementation of the new operator to return NULL if memory allocation failed rather than raise an exception). Those 2 constraints alone made it a nightmare. One has to ask oneself why it was so critical to not fail when memory allocation fails - how many programs can realistically continue to do useful things when there's no memory for them?
The Active Object thing which turned your program into one big series of event handlers was a misery IMO. The whole platform was crying out for co-routines.
I never looked at Apples approach to memory allocation failures but I think they probably just decided to add enough memory to the phone and boo-hoo if something went wrong. They saved state and let you restore so it looked almost as if the thing hadn't crashed.
All the other things you mention are true but there are root causes for it and one of them is the attempt to develop too much software for too many hardware types leading to too many bugs and then architecting the build system such that it could not scale.
I was on the team that rewrote the build system (a huge mistake BTW because it took too long). The Nokia build produced 85GB of output. After a lot of effort we got it down to 12h with a huge build cluster of 100s of machines and on a good day where nothing broke. A large part of that build was the same code getting recompiled with different options for alternate phone models. Most of the build was only able to build with RVCT. Compiler updates were very risky because all compilers have bugs and on a large codebase they get exposed somewhere or other. Compare to android where a 16core machine can build it in the order of an hour or even less perhaps - and most of that build is compiling Java to bytecode so it never has to be done more than once.
I have forgotten a lot but IIRC we really crushed the compilation and linking phase but packaging was done in a stupid way - into huge packages that are nothing like Linux ones and a couple of the largest ones of these tied up the build on one cluster node for a long time
In fact the whole linux packaging system itself offered the possibility of NOT recompiling the whole system repeatedly, but I worked on OBS after this and total rebuilds were more common than one might wish to believe. I still think it would have been better than the lunacy we were engaged in.
The clusters were still overburdened because there wasn't just one build to run on them - older versions of the OS still had to be rebuilt for updates for example. Also adding language support required a rebuild - IMO if one wants to consider design mistakes this and the use of the DLL format rather than .SO were the biggest unrecognised balls-ups.
DLLs are very unpleasant for compatibility because if you change the number of methods in a class it can destroy compatibility. the schemes for getting around this were horrible and just seemed to be unreliable (freezing).
The rest of the technical problems - almost all of them - were very adversely affected by this constipated system and it existed because of the decisions:
1) To make a lot of models with different hardware in them and more/less RAM.
2) To reduce component count - saving 50c here and there which had worked extremely well for Nokia in the past before those StrongARM and similar chips came out that created a big jump in ARM performance.
I had the fortune of being in one of the launch markets for Ricochet, which tried to sell a wireless modem back in the days of the Psion 5 and before GPRS was really a thing.
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
> Rome's eventual strategy—the Fabian strategy of delay, harassment, and avoiding direct confrontation—wasn't intuitive to Romans. It felt wrong.
My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
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.
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.
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.
> The mighty armies of Carthage? Sent packing in the First Punic War.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
Most important wars in the Ancient Mediterranean had a major naval component.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
In my view, it was won because the Elder Council underestimated the threat. Had they known how the defense of Sicily was going to go, they could have easily afforded to hire 50,000 more celts and turned them out onto the Italic peninsula to raise absolute hell. But hindsight is 20/20.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.
I used to talk about this at IBM, though mostly couched in the phrase "we have become an organization optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
One of the interesting things about the US military is the uniformity of training. There's an entire group in the Army called TRADOC, or Training and Doctrine Command. The US military is sort of slow to adopt new ideas, but once they do, TRADOC makes sure everyone gets them pounded into their heads. I haven't been in the Marines for close to 35 years, but I can still tell you what BAMCIS is an initialism for and could probably still call in a fire mission.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
>> Except it wasn't. Hannibal's retreating center was deliberate. As the Romans pushed deeper, Hannibal's stronger forces on the flanks held firm, then gradually enveloped the Roman formation. The Roman army found itself surrounded, packed so densely that many couldn't even raise their weapons. What followed was slaughter on an industrial scale.
It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).
Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.
NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:
The business side of this is largely a retelling of The Innovator's Dilemma: large successful businesses often struggle to adapt to nimble challengers that can innovate in ways that are structurally very difficult in the larger org.
Readit News
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/season/5/?epPage=...
(cannae = cannot)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...
There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.
Dead Comment
Silicon Valley cannot break free from its surveillance, data collection and online advertising mental model of the internet.
"It's that their past successes created the conditions for these mistakes. Their expertise became their vulnerability. Their conventional wisdom became the instrument of their downfall."
Ad services have been highly profitable in the absence of meaningful competition or regulation. But how long will those conditions last. Silicon Valley's "conventional wisdom" comprises "products" and "services" priced at zero dollars, "normalised" anti-competitive conduct, relentless data collection and surveillance and finally, the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".
"Disruptors and innovators intuitively understand the Cannae Problem. They specifically look for gaps between established organizations' mental models and reality. These gaps represent enormous opportunities."
The established "tech" organisations' mental models are so weak they were never able to find a business model. They had to resort to internet intermediation for the purpose of surveillance and advertising services.
Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
"Symbian C++" used to be a great search term ... for clubkiness horror stories. Or at least warnings that "don't expect this to be your pal's C++". Nevermind the kernel actually used a more crude form (a C++ "standard library" for kernel code is ... challenging). Definitely not "easy to read".
Symbian (and Nokia) recognised this to a degree; hence the "posix environment" or the Qt purchase. Symbian 9 was a great step towards scaling it. It only got into a phone ... with the last Symbian phone ever made. Bit of a pity - it could never really show what might have been.
They were steamrollered. Things just happened too fast for non-unix-kernel based systems to take the then-imminent multicore and 64bit ARM. Nevermind other misses like keyboard vs. touchscreen (Symbian UIQ was rather nice to use but nokia's S60 was not). Or in Nokia's case, not going all-in on Maemo/Meego.
(yes, been there. Only at its tail end, and only stayed as long as I did because in 2009, the job market wasn't great. Nonetheless, I remember a few things - great, sad and stupid. Symbian had all of that and then some. And definitely, Nokia also had a few "Varros").
[Here followeth the guff]
IMO the asyncronous API on Symbian was elegant and simple whereas on Linux it's a confusing messy disaster and to make async keywords work in a modern browser one has to use libraries like libuv to fake bits of it or insulate you from the many 1/2 useful event or polling APIs. I thought the Symbian file server had threads but I admit I'm not a great expert on any of that. I do think that you could have fixed those problems and every app would have continued working but better whereas in Linux you can do whatever you want and most software still won't benefit from it.
Symbian C++ was just C++ with an active object model to handle asynchronous events and the insistence that a program must not crash just because it runs out of memory (which made 2-phase constructors a thing and caused the reimplementation of the new operator to return NULL if memory allocation failed rather than raise an exception). Those 2 constraints alone made it a nightmare. One has to ask oneself why it was so critical to not fail when memory allocation fails - how many programs can realistically continue to do useful things when there's no memory for them?
The Active Object thing which turned your program into one big series of event handlers was a misery IMO. The whole platform was crying out for co-routines.
I never looked at Apples approach to memory allocation failures but I think they probably just decided to add enough memory to the phone and boo-hoo if something went wrong. They saved state and let you restore so it looked almost as if the thing hadn't crashed.
All the other things you mention are true but there are root causes for it and one of them is the attempt to develop too much software for too many hardware types leading to too many bugs and then architecting the build system such that it could not scale.
I was on the team that rewrote the build system (a huge mistake BTW because it took too long). The Nokia build produced 85GB of output. After a lot of effort we got it down to 12h with a huge build cluster of 100s of machines and on a good day where nothing broke. A large part of that build was the same code getting recompiled with different options for alternate phone models. Most of the build was only able to build with RVCT. Compiler updates were very risky because all compilers have bugs and on a large codebase they get exposed somewhere or other. Compare to android where a 16core machine can build it in the order of an hour or even less perhaps - and most of that build is compiling Java to bytecode so it never has to be done more than once.
I have forgotten a lot but IIRC we really crushed the compilation and linking phase but packaging was done in a stupid way - into huge packages that are nothing like Linux ones and a couple of the largest ones of these tied up the build on one cluster node for a long time
In fact the whole linux packaging system itself offered the possibility of NOT recompiling the whole system repeatedly, but I worked on OBS after this and total rebuilds were more common than one might wish to believe. I still think it would have been better than the lunacy we were engaged in.
The clusters were still overburdened because there wasn't just one build to run on them - older versions of the OS still had to be rebuilt for updates for example. Also adding language support required a rebuild - IMO if one wants to consider design mistakes this and the use of the DLL format rather than .SO were the biggest unrecognised balls-ups.
DLLs are very unpleasant for compatibility because if you change the number of methods in a class it can destroy compatibility. the schemes for getting around this were horrible and just seemed to be unreliable (freezing).
The rest of the technical problems - almost all of them - were very adversely affected by this constipated system and it existed because of the decisions:
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
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.
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.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_(461)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Bon_(468)
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
Deleted Comment
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
It's good to see this tradition persist.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincer_movement
Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.
NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusions
To be honest, though I'm Greek, far from feeling flattered about the high morale of my ancestors I just find the explanation hard to believe.