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I'm reading the Innovator's Dilemma right now, and I just finished the chapter about the storage industry. The author draws the conclusion that solid-state driv

I'm reading the Innovator's Dilemma right now, and I just finished the chapter about the storage industry. The author draws the conclusion that solid-state drives may eventually move upmarket from cash registers and embedded applications to PCs and such. Having seen the move from 5.25" HDDs to 3.5" HDDs, then the move from desktops to laptops, and now seeing SSDs becoming extremely common in laptops, tablets, and phones, I have to believe that the author predicted the future when he wrote the book. Since PC sales have dropped, people are not buying as many HDDs, and buying more SSDs, usually indirectly. Cloud infrastructure has likely gobbled up the existing HDD supply. But even there, SSDs are preferred for many applications, such as databases, since they're faster overall, storage limitations be damned. And now we're seeing the first SSD that has a capacity greater than HDDs, in a similar sized package. And no current HDD company has an SSD offering worth mentioning. It's disruption happening right before our eyes. History seems to repeat itself all too often!

__float 11y ago
Since when is Samsung not an HDD company?
- jotm 11y ago
  ~2011, when Seagate acquired their HDD manufacturing business: http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs-hard-drive-business-for-1-4-billion/ http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs... Samsung has focused on SSD storage ever since...
Tloewald 11y ago
You do realize that the example of the hard disk industry in The Innovator's Dilemma is actually one of the weakest in the book: "In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars." and: "Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed." Note that he published his book long after this stuff had been shown to be hopelessly wrong, without making any corrections. Many of his examples are similarly terrible. And those are the ones he cherry-picks to back his thesis. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-... I found The Innovator's Dilemma to be infuriating. It's a classic 20/20 hindsight -- just vague enough to apply to everything but excuse itself from any conspicuous counter-examples (Apple, say). Like most management fads, I guess. (Prediction: wait until electric, self-driving car tech becomes practical. Ford and GM will crush the "nimble" disruptors like bugs. Well, unless it's Apple. Then all bets are off.) Now, the hard disk makers may well be going under, but let's set aside Clay Christensen's over-rated terminology. Samsung is hardly a small startup "disrupting" big, slow stalwarts. Samsung dwarfs the hard disk makers -- it's more like Google "disrupting" libraries, or Walmart "disrupting" local businesses. BTW in Christensen's terms, this new disk is a "sustaining" innovation -- it's a better, faster, more complicated, harder-to-manufacture iteration of an existing, successful product.

__float 11y ago

Since when is Samsung not an HDD company?

jotm 11y ago
~2011, when Seagate acquired their HDD manufacturing business: http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs-hard-drive-business-for-1-4-billion/ http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs... Samsung has focused on SSD storage ever since...

Tloewald 11y ago

You do realize that the example of the hard disk industry in The Innovator's Dilemma is actually one of the weakest in the book: "In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars." and: "Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed." Note that he published his book long after this stuff had been shown to be hopelessly wrong, without making any corrections. Many of his examples are similarly terrible. And those are the ones he cherry-picks to back his thesis. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-... I found The Innovator's Dilemma to be infuriating. It's a classic 20/20 hindsight -- just vague enough to apply to everything but excuse itself from any conspicuous counter-examples (Apple, say). Like most management fads, I guess. (Prediction: wait until electric, self-driving car tech becomes practical. Ford and GM will crush the "nimble" disruptors like bugs. Well, unless it's Apple. Then all bets are off.) Now, the hard disk makers may well be going under, but let's set aside Clay Christensen's over-rated terminology. Samsung is hardly a small startup "disrupting" big, slow stalwarts. Samsung dwarfs the hard disk makers -- it's more like Google "disrupting" libraries, or Walmart "disrupting" local businesses. BTW in Christensen's terms, this new disk is a "sustaining" innovation -- it's a better, faster, more complicated, harder-to-manufacture iteration of an existing, successful product.