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A complete misunderstanding of the nature of disruption and a patently false statement that disruption is about the past and an post hoc justification. Disrupt

A complete misunderstanding of the nature of disruption and a patently false statement that disruption is about the past and an post hoc justification. Disruption is about providing a better product in the market in the midst of legacy producers who have become slow and indifferent due to their success. We see it every day with thousands of startups and legacy companies alike; google, apple, uber, tesla, and many more. It didn't start with The Innovators Dilemma and the author doesn't define it, mere he observed some of its properties. This seems to be the type of nostalgic meandering that's used often in the publishing industry to justify its value of legacy aesthetic over innovation.

cageface 12y ago
There are plenty of counter examples cited in the article. And she also points out some significant flaws in the examples Christensen used to support his original theory. Maybe some people just aren't comfortable having their new orthodoxies questioned?
- tsunamifury 12y ago
  Companies =/= products
hga 12y ago
"Disruption is about providing a better product in the market" Errr, no, or not as described in the first book. The disruptive companies start out providing a "worse" product, for the purposes of the legacy companies' market niches, but that satisfies another niche, frequently (always?) a new one. One that the legacy companies are ill or entirely unfit to satisfy. With the experience in those lower end niche markets, the disruptive innovator eventually moves up market with a better product, and legacy companies can evaporate "overnight" as these things go. My favorite example was steam powered excavators vs. hydraulic, post-WWII (plenty of weapons systems used hydraulic actuators, they were fast). The former were used for big stuff, as I recall nothing smaller than sewage lines. The initial hydraulic ones had a bucket size of, say, 1/4 a cubic yard, way too small for what the former did. But they were just the right size for providing utility access to a home, a market which exploded after the war, a market which was previously handled by guys with picks and shovels. Quality, and the size of the jobs they could take on, steadily improved, until they could do what steam excavators could do ... without the danger of a chain snapping and hitting the operator or others. At which point they had a vastly superior product, satisfying a previously unrealized desire, and the legacy companies died fairly quick and hard deaths (he goes a lot more into why they generally can't adopt the new technology before it's too late). The book had similar examples of "dirt bikes", the not very hi-fi Sony transistor radio (I think), and of course several generations of disk drives, for which he had the best data and for which I had the best background (starting programming in 1977 so I watched the transitions). OK, now read the section of the article pertaining to excavators, and off the top of my head, I've never heard of O. & K. and Demag, and I'll note Hitachi probably suffered serious destruction and disruption of the physical plant and business as part of our WWII bombing campaign (just read the book Whirlwind on that, really bad). Bucyrus is a company I've heard of, in terms of their huge machines, that were used to operate big mines and the like (I live close to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brutus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brutus, and while a Cub or Boy Scout in the '70s visited it while it was still operational, and a power plant I think it fed). Their doing OK until the US largely ended that sort of thing (NIMBY, BANANA, etc.) could easily reconcile both observations. That the author didn't try to make the case that their excavator business stayed healthy is probably telling. Hmmm, per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demag Demag was a big crane and the like company, and until being bought by an American company in 2011, did "bridge cranes, hoists, material handling equipment, gantry cranes and port technology." But I did find hits on their name and excavator. O. & K. is another former German company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenstein_%26_Koppel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenstein_%26_Koppel where excavators are prominently mentioned in the Wikipedia article. However they suffered massive disruptions in WWII, e.g. you can guess which "race" Orenstein belonged to, and how long that family was allowed to own company. Bombed, part ended up behind the Iron Curtain ... again, hmmm. Yeah, if all three of these foreign companies essentially started anew after the war, they're health wouldn't at all invalidate the excavator example in the book.

cageface 12y ago

There are plenty of counter examples cited in the article. And she also points out some significant flaws in the examples Christensen used to support his original theory. Maybe some people just aren't comfortable having their new orthodoxies questioned?

tsunamifury 12y ago
Companies =/= products

hga 12y ago

"Disruption is about providing a better product in the market" Errr, no, or not as described in the first book. The disruptive companies start out providing a "worse" product, for the purposes of the legacy companies' market niches, but that satisfies another niche, frequently (always?) a new one. One that the legacy companies are ill or entirely unfit to satisfy. With the experience in those lower end niche markets, the disruptive innovator eventually moves up market with a better product, and legacy companies can evaporate "overnight" as these things go. My favorite example was steam powered excavators vs. hydraulic, post-WWII (plenty of weapons systems used hydraulic actuators, they were fast). The former were used for big stuff, as I recall nothing smaller than sewage lines. The initial hydraulic ones had a bucket size of, say, 1/4 a cubic yard, way too small for what the former did. But they were just the right size for providing utility access to a home, a market which exploded after the war, a market which was previously handled by guys with picks and shovels. Quality, and the size of the jobs they could take on, steadily improved, until they could do what steam excavators could do ... without the danger of a chain snapping and hitting the operator or others. At which point they had a vastly superior product, satisfying a previously unrealized desire, and the legacy companies died fairly quick and hard deaths (he goes a lot more into why they generally can't adopt the new technology before it's too late). The book had similar examples of "dirt bikes", the not very hi-fi Sony transistor radio (I think), and of course several generations of disk drives, for which he had the best data and for which I had the best background (starting programming in 1977 so I watched the transitions). OK, now read the section of the article pertaining to excavators, and off the top of my head, I've never heard of O. & K. and Demag, and I'll note Hitachi probably suffered serious destruction and disruption of the physical plant and business as part of our WWII bombing campaign (just read the book Whirlwind on that, really bad). Bucyrus is a company I've heard of, in terms of their huge machines, that were used to operate big mines and the like (I live close to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brutus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brutus, and while a Cub or Boy Scout in the '70s visited it while it was still operational, and a power plant I think it fed). Their doing OK until the US largely ended that sort of thing (NIMBY, BANANA, etc.) could easily reconcile both observations. That the author didn't try to make the case that their excavator business stayed healthy is probably telling. Hmmm, per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demag Demag was a big crane and the like company, and until being bought by an American company in 2011, did "bridge cranes, hoists, material handling equipment, gantry cranes and port technology." But I did find hits on their name and excavator. O. & K. is another former German company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenstein_%26_Koppel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenstein_%26_Koppel where excavators are prominently mentioned in the Wikipedia article. However they suffered massive disruptions in WWII, e.g. you can guess which "race" Orenstein belonged to, and how long that family was allowed to own company. Bombed, part ended up behind the Iron Curtain ... again, hmmm. Yeah, if all three of these foreign companies essentially started anew after the war, they're health wouldn't at all invalidate the excavator example in the book.