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The Innovator's Dilemma explains why. The response "I don't get it -- I read through the entire review and I was hard pressed to find where ________ shined" is

by gvb 16y ago

The Innovator's Dilemma explains why. The response "I don't get it -- I read through the entire review and I was hard pressed to find where ________ shined" is exactly what entrenched companies said a year or two before they were destroyed by the lower capability (but growing) competitors. In The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen spends quite a bit of time on the disk drive case study, where over several generational transitions the entrenched bigger-faster-better companies when under because they could not match their lower capability (smaller, but more expensive in the case of hard drives) competitors. When the competitors broke out of their niches and into the mainline with size competitive products, they destroyed the entrenched companies with their cost advantages. ARM owns the low power niche and now it is threatening to catch up with Intel - being "good enough" - in low value moderate performance market. The traditional response of an entrenched company is to retreat to "higher ground," in this case more complex, faster desktops and servers. The problem is, "higher ground" has limited height and the low areas of that high ground keep eroding. Intel is addressing the threat with lower power (and slower) chips - the Atom. It will be very interesting to see if Intel can stave off their dilemma and become competitive with ARM on the low power, moderate performance, extremely low cost front... and that last part extremely low cost is both the key and Intel's Achilles heel. References: * http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996 http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

ippisl 16y ago
Intel did made a very serious move on the low cost front, by letting TSMC sell SOC's with ATOM cores. that was really against the standard intel profit model , but they knew they had to do it. The last i heard is that nobody(or maybe a single company), took them up on their offer. there could be many reasons for this : price, lack of trust of intel by hardware/SOC manufactureres, power consumption ,investments and experience in ARM development, the ability to reuse ARM based assets in many computer platforms(netbook, tablet, phone) Maybe intel's move was the right one , but just too late.like you said , the innovator's dilemma in action.
stcredzero 16y ago
> ARM owns the low power niche and now it is threatening to catch up with Intel - being "good enough" - in low value moderate performance market. The traditional response of an entrenched company is to retreat to "higher ground," in this case more complex, faster desktops and servers. So Intel, like Sun, will be trapped at the high-end of irrelevance? Is Apple pulling the same catch-up maneuver with "good enough" general computing capabilities on the iPad? (Or are they going to be trapped at the high end of irrelevance by Google and Android on commodity multitouch tablets?)
- gvb 16y ago
  > So Intel, like Sun, will be trapped at the high-end of irrelevance? It is too early to tell, but there is a large risk of this. Intel has tried several times to break out of, go beyond, the x86 architecture and has mostly failed at this. Examples are: * iAPX 432 "object oriented" processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 * i960 RISC processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 * Itanium VLIW processor which has had limited succes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium * Larrabee - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) > Is Apple pulling the same catch-up maneuver with "good enough" general computing capabilities on the iPad? (Or are they going to be trapped at the high end of irrelevance by Google and Android on commodity multitouch tablets?) The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on the niche markets where companies hone their skills, and then the niche markets "expand upwards" into a commodity market, undercutting and toppling the market leaders. Apple is a very interesting company from the Innovator's Dilemma point of view. They have a interesting history of creating innovations themselves and also commanding a premium for those innovations. I think Apple's "secret sauce" is to create innovations in style (especially) and implementation (It Just Works[tm]) which are very difficult for competitors to duplicate. This allows them to both be a market leader and command a price premium. Essentially Apple has been successful in self-defining their market in such a way as to exclude the innovator's dilemma. What I'm trying to say is, if you let the market define you, you are vulnerable to the innovator's dilemma. Apple does an incredible job of defining their own market and not conceding that control to outside forces. They do this, not by asking customers what they want (and thus being constrained by their customers' imaginations), but by being more imaginative than their customers. Henry Ford supposedly said "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.99d_asked_people_what_they_wanted.2C_they_would_have_asked_for_a_better_horse.22 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.9...
hga 16y ago
I don't sense ARM as being terrifically disruptive in potential, at least for Intel, but that really hinges on two interrelated things: How important is it for ARM to develop a 64 bit architecture? How much will the "big fast higher power consumption CPU market" remain a big thing? Intel will never beat ARM in the low power, moderate performance, extremely low cost market; what you and I emphasize, the different lower margin business model, is what established firms almost universally fail to negotiate, although Intel is trying with the Atom. Per the above two questions of mine, I'm just not sure this will be relevant to Intel and its markets. It almost certainly depends on the future limits of the mobile market (where low power is a bit more important than price), which I don't think we're in a position to confidently predict right now. We know it'll be big, we don't know how big, and we don't know how much or when it will displace the existing order. Final point: microprocessors usually align into one of four categories: Zero cost (microwaves and dishwashers) Zero units ($200K rad hard CPUs for space) Zero power (the mobile market which ARM owns for that reason) Zero time (to finish a computation) ARM hasn't even tried to seriously compete in the latter until they came out with the multicore SMP out-of-order superscaler Cortex A9 ... and that's a 32 bit macroarchitecture. Can they use their existing foundation to directly attack Intel in the Zero Time market? Don't know, but I don't see it happening soon. Will enough people abandon their 64 bit Intel systems for mobile 32 bit ARM systems, perhaps with the cloud handling the heavy lifting? Time will tell, that's perhaps the more likely short term ARM disruptive outcome.

by gvb 16y ago

ippisl 16y ago

Intel did made a very serious move on the low cost front, by letting TSMC sell SOC's with ATOM cores. that was really against the standard intel profit model , but they knew they had to do it. The last i heard is that nobody(or maybe a single company), took them up on their offer. there could be many reasons for this : price, lack of trust of intel by hardware/SOC manufactureres, power consumption ,investments and experience in ARM development, the ability to reuse ARM based assets in many computer platforms(netbook, tablet, phone) Maybe intel's move was the right one , but just too late.like you said , the innovator's dilemma in action.

stcredzero 16y ago

> ARM owns the low power niche and now it is threatening to catch up with Intel - being "good enough" - in low value moderate performance market. The traditional response of an entrenched company is to retreat to "higher ground," in this case more complex, faster desktops and servers. So Intel, like Sun, will be trapped at the high-end of irrelevance? Is Apple pulling the same catch-up maneuver with "good enough" general computing capabilities on the iPad? (Or are they going to be trapped at the high end of irrelevance by Google and Android on commodity multitouch tablets?)

gvb 16y ago
> So Intel, like Sun, will be trapped at the high-end of irrelevance? It is too early to tell, but there is a large risk of this. Intel has tried several times to break out of, go beyond, the x86 architecture and has mostly failed at this. Examples are: * iAPX 432 "object oriented" processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 * i960 RISC processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 * Itanium VLIW processor which has had limited succes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium * Larrabee - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) > Is Apple pulling the same catch-up maneuver with "good enough" general computing capabilities on the iPad? (Or are they going to be trapped at the high end of irrelevance by Google and Android on commodity multitouch tablets?) The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on the niche markets where companies hone their skills, and then the niche markets "expand upwards" into a commodity market, undercutting and toppling the market leaders. Apple is a very interesting company from the Innovator's Dilemma point of view. They have a interesting history of creating innovations themselves and also commanding a premium for those innovations. I think Apple's "secret sauce" is to create innovations in style (especially) and implementation (It Just Works[tm]) which are very difficult for competitors to duplicate. This allows them to both be a market leader and command a price premium. Essentially Apple has been successful in self-defining their market in such a way as to exclude the innovator's dilemma. What I'm trying to say is, if you let the market define you, you are vulnerable to the innovator's dilemma. Apple does an incredible job of defining their own market and not conceding that control to outside forces. They do this, not by asking customers what they want (and thus being constrained by their customers' imaginations), but by being more imaginative than their customers. Henry Ford supposedly said "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.99d_asked_people_what_they_wanted.2C_they_would_have_asked_for_a_better_horse.22 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.9...

hga 16y ago

I don't sense ARM as being terrifically disruptive in potential, at least for Intel, but that really hinges on two interrelated things: How important is it for ARM to develop a 64 bit architecture? How much will the "big fast higher power consumption CPU market" remain a big thing? Intel will never beat ARM in the low power, moderate performance, extremely low cost market; what you and I emphasize, the different lower margin business model, is what established firms almost universally fail to negotiate, although Intel is trying with the Atom. Per the above two questions of mine, I'm just not sure this will be relevant to Intel and its markets. It almost certainly depends on the future limits of the mobile market (where low power is a bit more important than price), which I don't think we're in a position to confidently predict right now. We know it'll be big, we don't know how big, and we don't know how much or when it will displace the existing order. Final point: microprocessors usually align into one of four categories: Zero cost (microwaves and dishwashers) Zero units ($200K rad hard CPUs for space) Zero power (the mobile market which ARM owns for that reason) Zero time (to finish a computation) ARM hasn't even tried to seriously compete in the latter until they came out with the multicore SMP out-of-order superscaler Cortex A9 ... and that's a 32 bit macroarchitecture. Can they use their existing foundation to directly attack Intel in the Zero Time market? Don't know, but I don't see it happening soon. Will enough people abandon their 64 bit Intel systems for mobile 32 bit ARM systems, perhaps with the cloud handling the heavy lifting? Time will tell, that's perhaps the more likely short term ARM disruptive outcome.