Disruptive Technology, Here And Now
4 Oct 2005, 12:59:26 pm
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Rich Gordon describes how transistor radios caught the tube-radio companies off-guard, even though there was plenty of indications that transistor radios would be important. The lack of early-adopters among the existing companies, and subsequent takeover by the 'upstarts' is called "disruptive technology," a term coined by Harvard prof Clayton Christensen. It works thusly:- They generally produce inferior performance based on the prevailing standards of the market.
- They enable products that appeal to a new, underserved group of customers.
- The new products — and markets — are less profitable than the ones attracting the attention of leading companies, so they don’t compete vigorously.
- While the traditional market leaders stand by, companies that capitalize on the new technology keep improving it until it becomes competitive with its predecessors.
- The traditional market leaders fail to adapt to the new technology, their sales plummet, and a new generation of market-leading companies is born.
This sequence is repeating itself left-and-right in the migration from offline to online areas. However, it's not a guarantee of failure for old technologies: above, I've bolded important sections. These demonstrate where the existing companies fail to keep up, flounder, and are overtaken by the new product.
Now, from a publisher's standpoint -- ink-and-paper publishing looks like it's falling behind the wayside. Hell, people have been predicting it for decades, but just because books are still selling well doesn't mean the above sequence can be overlooked. The article above uses the change from newspapers to online news sources as an example; publishing is already seeing its affects in certain areas.
Answers? I haven't got any. I mostly wrote this entry as a bookmark, a reminder to myself to keep disruptive technology in mind. The transistor didn't kill off tube radios; tube-based audio is still a highly profitable market, just not in the same way. Print publishing won't die off, either -- but it'll have to become something else. With all the innovations in printing (POD, for one), and explosion of both readers and the written word, there's something on the horizon that will become the future of books.
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