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 busines

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.