A death and decline so easily forseen...
The death of performance HDDs is surely one of the most predictable trends of recent times. It was always going to start gradually, but as the price per GB of SSDs inexorably dropped, that gradual trend was surely going to turn into a catastrophic decline. HDDs were simply never going to get remotely near SSD latency figures, and reduced latency is possibly the key performance issue in virtually every area of IT, whether it's processors, memory, storage or communications. HDDs had pretty well hit the physical limit on that issue several years ago.
It was a bit like Kodak and its relationship with digital photography. Rather than being bold enough to make a full-on transformation, it got stuck half way afraid it might cannibalise it's film income. It's very possible that Kodak wasn't going to survive such a radical change in technology (they did, after all, pioneer some digital sensor technology), but the lesson seems to be if you are in denial over what is an inevitable technical trend and are bold enough to make the required radical decisions when the going is good, you aren't going to be around in the long term.
That's disruptive technologies for you. Every major tech company needs a strategy for what they might do should their particular golden goose's eggs become irrelevant.