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As I recall, Apple supposedly bought a Cray to simulate the 68030, and the apocryphal story is that someone announced to Cray that Apple had just bought one of

As I recall, Apple supposedly bought a Cray to simulate the 68030, and the apocryphal story is that someone announced to Cray that Apple had just bought one of his computers to help them design their next computer, to which he replied, "that's funny, I just bought one of their computers to help design my next computer". By the time this happened, Jobs would likely have been running NeXT (the first NeXT Cube shipped with a 68030). Also, the article mentions Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma focussing specifically on his disk drive manufacturer story, which was already outdated and wrong when he first published it (the "disrupted" companies went on to dominate and extinguish their "disruptors").

pavlov 11y ago
Interesting -- I honestly didn't know that about Christensen's disk drive study. (I read the book ages ago and haven't kept up with the debate...) I'd be happy to update the article with a link to discussion about the disk drive studies being wrong.
- srunni 11y ago
  I'm not sure what discussion the OP was referring to, but there was a recent publication in the MIT Sloan Management Review: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-christensen-get-disruption-wrong- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-c... http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-of-disruptive-innovation/ http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-...
eridius 11y ago
The other apocryphal story is that Steve Jobs walked into Cray's offices unannounced, in casual attire, asked to buy a supercomputer, and was almost laughed out of the building until he managed to convince the receptionist of who he was.
rythie 11y ago
Citation needed on the Innovator's Dilemma point. I can't find anything that backs up your point. As I remember from reading the book, most of the companies mentioned in the book went bust, so there is no way they could have dominate and extinguished anything.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Since I can't link to the text of the book (and don't have my copy handy), here's a New Yorker story on the piece: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-... '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 later in the same article: 'As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties.' and, finally, this gem: 'On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent.' So he wrote a book on disruptive innovation, where his main exemplar was how Seagate et al were felled by small, agile innovators, and published it the year Seagate crushed the small, agile innovators. The book is full of wrong (it's basically fairly accurate about how innovation gets stifled in companies that fundamentally aren't innovative -- companies driven by sales commissions for example -- but those aren't the interesting cases; Apple, Kodak, Polaroid, AT&T, Xerox -- the companies which ought to be the best examples of his case -- don't follow his storyline at all).
  - rfreytag 11y ago
    How is the demise of DEC and demise-of-IBM-as-a-micro-and-minicomputer-maker not an example of an interesting case of disruption by Apple, Compaq, and others?
    - Tloewald 11y ago
      IBM got "disrupted" by Apple in what sense? It responded with the insanely successful IBM PC and in fact was disrupted not so much by innovation as poor business decisions (e.g. signing a contract with Microsoft that allowed Microsoft to undermine it). Now, in 1985 you might have written a story about how Commodore (say) had disrupted Apple. But that didn't go too well. DEC certainly grabbed a lot of market from IBM in the 70s but, um, look who's still in business (selling mainframes no less)? DEC had its lunch eaten by Compaq et al, but who absorbed both of them? HP, a powerhouse from the 1970s. Oh yeah, and then IBM and DEC got "disrupted" by Sun. It actually looks a lot like the hard disk story -- small innovators come out with a new thing and quickly gain success but ultimately can't sustain it and fall by the wayside or get acquired by a big established player -- with the far more recent exception of Apple which came and ate the lunches of a whole bunch of companies some of whom had "disrupted" it a decade or so earlier. And Christensen's theories are absolutely useless for explaining anything Apple or Steve Jobs did.

pavlov 11y ago

Interesting -- I honestly didn't know that about Christensen's disk drive study. (I read the book ages ago and haven't kept up with the debate...) I'd be happy to update the article with a link to discussion about the disk drive studies being wrong.

srunni 11y ago
I'm not sure what discussion the OP was referring to, but there was a recent publication in the MIT Sloan Management Review: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-christensen-get-disruption-wrong- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-c... http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-of-disruptive-innovation/ http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-...

eridius 11y ago

The other apocryphal story is that Steve Jobs walked into Cray's offices unannounced, in casual attire, asked to buy a supercomputer, and was almost laughed out of the building until he managed to convince the receptionist of who he was.

rythie 11y ago

Citation needed on the Innovator's Dilemma point. I can't find anything that backs up your point. As I remember from reading the book, most of the companies mentioned in the book went bust, so there is no way they could have dominate and extinguished anything.

Tloewald 11y ago
Since I can't link to the text of the book (and don't have my copy handy), here's a New Yorker story on the piece: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-... '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 later in the same article: 'As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties.' and, finally, this gem: 'On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent.' So he wrote a book on disruptive innovation, where his main exemplar was how Seagate et al were felled by small, agile innovators, and published it the year Seagate crushed the small, agile innovators. The book is full of wrong (it's basically fairly accurate about how innovation gets stifled in companies that fundamentally aren't innovative -- companies driven by sales commissions for example -- but those aren't the interesting cases; Apple, Kodak, Polaroid, AT&T, Xerox -- the companies which ought to be the best examples of his case -- don't follow his storyline at all).
- rfreytag 11y ago
  How is the demise of DEC and demise-of-IBM-as-a-micro-and-minicomputer-maker not an example of an interesting case of disruption by Apple, Compaq, and others?
  - Tloewald 11y ago
    IBM got "disrupted" by Apple in what sense? It responded with the insanely successful IBM PC and in fact was disrupted not so much by innovation as poor business decisions (e.g. signing a contract with Microsoft that allowed Microsoft to undermine it). Now, in 1985 you might have written a story about how Commodore (say) had disrupted Apple. But that didn't go too well. DEC certainly grabbed a lot of market from IBM in the 70s but, um, look who's still in business (selling mainframes no less)? DEC had its lunch eaten by Compaq et al, but who absorbed both of them? HP, a powerhouse from the 1970s. Oh yeah, and then IBM and DEC got "disrupted" by Sun. It actually looks a lot like the hard disk story -- small innovators come out with a new thing and quickly gain success but ultimately can't sustain it and fall by the wayside or get acquired by a big established player -- with the far more recent exception of Apple which came and ate the lunches of a whole bunch of companies some of whom had "disrupted" it a decade or so earlier. And Christensen's theories are absolutely useless for explaining anything Apple or Steve Jobs did.