A fork is only a choice if both options are written to the same level of detail

The asymmetry that decides it

Thirty-three forks are on record and twenty-five were never reversed. Read the four that were undone next to the twenty-five that stuck and the difference is not the quality of the judgment. It is that in the failures, one option was specified and the other was described.

Kodak decided in 1969 to enter instant photography by inventing around Polaroid's patents rather than licensing them, believing a decade of clean-room invention could outrun the patent thicket. 'License the patents' is a specification: a price, a term, a scope. 'Invent around them' is a hope with a budget. A permanent injunction barred Kodak from making or selling instant film or cameras from January 1986, after it had sold roughly $1.4 billion to an estimated 16 million customers, and it owed damages near its total revenue.

Amgen sought patents in 2014 claiming the entire functional class of PCSK9-blocking antibodies, most of which it had never seen or built, then sued to enforce them. The appeals court found the function-defined claims lacked enablement in 2021 and the Supreme Court affirmed unanimously in May 2023. The claim was written as a category rather than as a set of things that exist.

The ones that held were bounded

Apple decided in 2020 to transition the Mac to its own silicon, and the decision was carried through to the last Intel Mac. A finite list of machines, a sequence, an end.

Bristol Myers Squibb wrote an all-or-nothing cliff into a contingent value right in 2019. The record's verdict is that the clause worked exactly as written and the CVR terminated paying nothing. Whether that was fair is a separate argument; it was not ambiguous, and nobody had to litigate what it meant.

Daimler spun off trucks in 2021 and the truck arm listed while the parent renamed itself, both completed as chosen. Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 and the separation of leadership from engineering persisted and deepened over the following two decades — a bounded decision that held, and whose consequences this record traces forward into the MAX.

The org chart is the reliable exception

Procter & Gamble reorganized ten product categories into six sector business units in July 2019, each with its own chief executive and profit and loss, to eliminate a three-way matrix that diffused accountability. The matrix replacement stuck. The sixth sector folded back into five by September 2021.

That is the most common partial outcome in this set and the most forgiving. A reorganization is cheap to adjust, which is why it is the option companies reach for when the real fork is harder — and why a fork that resolves into an org chart is usually a fork that has not been made.