Must-read: Ben Thompson: “Obsoletive: Revolutionary Products in Tech Don’t Disrupt–They Obsolete”
Must-Read: (2013): Obsoletive: Revolutionary Products in Tech Don’t Disrupt–They Obsolete: “[Christiansenian] disruption is low-end…
…a disruptive product is worse than the incumbent technology on the vectors that the incumbent’s customers care about. But, it’s cheaper, and better on other vectors that different customers care about. And, eventually, as the new technology improves, it takes the incumbent’s market.
This is not what happened in cell phones. In 2006, the Nokia 1600 was the top-selling phone… the BlackBerry Pearl the best-selling smartphone. Both were only a year away from their doom, but that doom was not a cheaper, less-capable product, but in fact the exact opposite: a far more powerful, and fantastically more expensive product called the iPhone…. The problem for Nokia and BlackBerry was that their specialties–calling, messaging, and email–were simply apps: one function on a general-purpose computer. A dedicated device that only did calls, or messages, or email, was simply obsolete. An even cursory examination of tech history makes it clear that ‘obsoletion’–where a cheaper, single-purpose product is replaced by a more expensive, general purpose product–is just as common as ‘disruption’–even more so, in fact…. The Mac (and PC), iPod, and iPhone weren’t so much disruptive as they were obsoletive. They absorbed a wide range of specialized tools for a price far greater than any one of those tools cost on their own….
Christensen’s theory of disruption remains an incredibly elegant and insightful framework for understanding why some companies–like Microsoft, to name the best example–decline. But it’s dramatically over-applied in technology. Most new products are simply better… while the most revolutionary products… are obsoletive. They are more expensive, more capable, and change the way we live…