Savvy and able horse-drawn carriage and buggy-whip makers adapted to a growing automobile market scavenging their sales in the early 20th century by investing in the makers of the automobiles and/or becoming subcontractors for automobile components.
US auto companies answered the call of the US government at the advent of WWII and dramatically boosted their revenues by adapting (retooling) their factories to produce tanks and other military vehicles and equipment.
US auto companies adapted to a fast-growing influx of Japanese compact cars scavenging their sales in the 1970s by building and selling their own compact models.
Soft drink companies adapted to a fast-growing bottled water market scavenging their sales in the 1990s by offering their own bottled water brands. (Aquafina, Dasani, etc.)
Soft drink companies adapted to a fast-growing energy drink market scavenging their sales around the turn of the 21st century by offering their own energy drink brands. (Burn, Amp, etc.)
Big tobacco companies will adapt to a fast-growing e-cigarette industry scavenging their revenues in the early 21st century by creating and/or rebranding e-cig products to sell under their own brands, or under new brand names they will create.
This is why they haven't crushed e-cigs long before now. They're not stupid. And they're not incapable. They've been watching the e-cig industry very closely since its inception. They have billions of dollars and huge political clout which they could have used much more effectively than they have so far to abort vaping before many of us would have ever even heard of it.
Regardless of what they've been feeding the government and media, they know very well that e-liquid is mostly (if not completely) harmless, and therefore that a significant percentage of the public will eventually come to know the same. I guarantee you that they've been buying e-juices and breaking them down in their own laboratories for several years to determine exactly what's in them. Or rather, to confirm what most e-juice vendors advertise openly regarding ingredients.
I'm sure tobacco companies have been testing vaping products in their own secret focus groups to determine their effectiveness as a smoking cessation method. Take 100 smokers and record what they smoke and how many per day. Give them various vaping products to try out. Each week, record how many people are smoking less, and how many have quit entirely.
I guarantee you anything we know about vaping, they know about vaping. I believe they've let it grow just as it has so far, and have only used a small percentage of their power to push for regulations, more for market control than market reduction. Are they setting up to do what Coca-Cola and Pepsi and Ford and GM have done by adapting to new markets rather than destroying them? You better believe it.
In 20-30 years, us early adopters will still be using our VAMOs and Sigeleis and Stingrays and Protanks and Nautiluses and RDAs (rebuilt and restored as necessary if they've become unavailable) while the late adopters will be using Philip-Morris and Imperial and RJ Reynolds and British American brands of e-cigs. And I feel certain that they will not stop at cigalikes, but will also (sooner or later) offer tank systems once they see fit to join that aspect of the industry.
I doubt they'll get into the mech/RDA market, since it will be considerably smaller than the rest of the vaping market, making it much less profitable for them to offset the costs of adapting to it. What we call "dripping" will, therefore, continue to be served by existing product brands. As long as the subset of drippers is small enough to not encroach too much into big tobacco's respective sections of the e-cig market, I don't think they'll try to quash it either. It'll remain as a cult/hobbyist realm.
Big Tobacco has been losing sales significantly for over thirty years, ever since anti-smoking PSAs and big lawsuits began eating away at their revenues. I think they'll come around to welcome a new way to make money once they've developed and tested their strategies for doing so.
They will not kill what they can join and profit from.
So there's my stab at vaping futurism.(Adapted a bit from my previous positions after putting more thought into it recently.)
Great analysis yet I'm still not convinced that their agenda is to control ecig industry rather than shutting it down completely .
The thing is that even if tobacco companies will get most of the industry revenue , it's still nothing compared to their tobacco profit , mostly because e-liquids are so easy to make so many people use DIY juices .
Pah! I give up. 
) stated a study had shown that smoke breaks cost Canadian businesses 15 billion dollars a year. A lot of the anti sentiment is about money.
