It’s happened multiple times before. Mostly when a big company is heavily invested in an alternative technology. They don’t want to completely retool, since it’s expensive, but they want to limit others from developing it, and so become competitors (that eat into profit margins).
The simplest solution is to buy up critical patents and either sit on the, or slow boat them.
Oil and car companies did this with electric/alternative car research for a while. Kodak also did it with digital cameras, since they competed with film cameras. It doesn’t last forever, but it can give decades of extra profit, before the competition gets over the speed bump.