Finally, someone else who agrees that the iPhone was a disruptive product. It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price. It appealed to a different set of values (i.e. usability and interface), ignored features that were seen as critical in the existing market of smartphone users (No third-party apps at launch? No copy/paste? No editing of Word documents?!), and it blindsided the incumbents (who focused on business users rather than the new market of everyday consumers). Nowadays you'd have trouble convincing people that existing smartphone users mocked the iPhone when it first came out.
It's worth noting that even Christensen didn't think the iPhone would be a success.[0]
Data plans were the disruption that made the iPhone more than "a faster horse." They allowed the iPhone's architecture to be feasible and the idea of the app store to be viable. Yes, touch screens are an improvement over pens, but the change that sunk RIM was logistical.
This is how it played out in Australia too. Pre-iPhone data was expensive. My pre-iphone "smart" phones were hobbled by a lack of data which the iphone didn't suffer from.
The first iPhone was barely a success. Apple had to give a price drop merely two months after it went on sale. The second iPhone, the iPhone 3G, was the breakout hit. Then Apple changed the rollout process and used a 'cheap' price[1] to accelerate sales.
[1]'cheap' initial payment with an expensive mobile contract.
Apple had to give a price drop merely two months after it went on sale.
I speak as someone whose first iPhone was a 3G, but I think it's possible that the price drop was part of the plan all along. It was be a smart price segmentation move: get everyone who's unbearably keen to pay a whole lot, then move on to people who are bit less unbearably keen at a slightly lower price.
It HAD lower price: it disrupted the portable computers which were more expensive at that time.
You already needed to pay for a phone, so the real price compared to a portable was just how much more expensive the iPhone was compared to a standard mobile phone.
Due to the system with 2 year phone contracts in USA, that extra price was low.
This was state of the art around the time the iPhone hit: HTC8525 [0]. That is not a phone, that is a ridiculously small screen welded to a slow computer with terrible battery life; and it was $299 on contract at the time.
The disruption in the iPhone was technical, social, political and economic.
Nah, the old Windows phones were just fine. Did many of the things we now pretend that Apple invented. But they were for nerds. And huge phones sell reasonably well today.
The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.
And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.
While I think this is mostly true (Nokia fans love to point out that every possible smartphone feature appeared on at least one Nokia product which may have shipped in the 1800s), there is one way in which this simply is not true, and it's a way which really did change everything.
The browser.
The difference in 2007 between browsing on the iPhone and browsing on any other phone was kind of like, well, comparing desktop Safari in 2007 to trying to browse in 2007 with Netscape 4. Maybe not quite that good. Phones often had only one font available to them, had very limited CSS support, often had no Javascript support. Windows Phone and the Nokia Communicator were the best of what had been out before then, and to say "they were for nerds" is an understatement. Only nerds would tolerate them.
Look at articles after the iPhone's introduction about data usage -- it absolutely skyrocketed, and it was all being driven by the browser. For the first time people actually had a real web browser in their pocket, and it really did make all the difference.
It wasn't just a phone by any stretch -- what made it disruptive was that browser in combination with the touch UI (by far the best way to use a browser on a pocket-sized screen). Revolutionary, or evolutionary? You can make a case either way, but the iPhone didn't upend the smartphone market just because it was pretty and had great advertisements.
Yeah, this is probably the only thing Apple really introduced with the iPhone - a capable browser making it possible to use the internet just like you would on a regular computer, more or less (no flash). But apart from that, all other functions already existed, and while on Windows Phone you had tons of free applications and most people didn't really pay for software, Apple made it a habit to ad-support or sell apps for a fee. I don't see this as a positive trend, but that's just me.
I think the iPhone being first with capacitive multitouch that didn't suck like resistive screens being used in all other phones at the time had something to do with its success also. But feel free to add that and another 10 or so "yeah, this is probably the only other thing introduced with the iPhone...."
The sheer performance of the iPhone blew away Windows Mobile. It was an order of magnitude more responsive than any mobile device before it. The scrolling, the swipe gestures, the pinch to zoom ... it was essentially the first time we had desktop grade performance in your pocket.
I don't really agree with you here. It's not because the interface is made for speed and gestures that you had "desktop performance" in your pocket. It's just a different approach. The first iPhone could not really do any multitask at all (if I remember correctly) so trying to compare a mono-task system versus what the Windows Mobile devices could do at the time is frivolous.
Not at all. It was the technical underpinnings of the iPhone that made the aesthetic and ease of use disruptions possible. If what you are saying were true, all Microsoft had to do was re skin the old Windows Mobile with a fresh user interface and all will be well. They tried that of course and it totally failed.
The old windows mobile was a complete dog. Let's take just one example, individual processes could only be allocated up to 32 megabytes of RAM. Really. That's one reason why it could never have run a decent browser, or really a decent anything else. That alone rendered it fundamentally crippled compared to iOS full 32 bit preemptive multitasking kernel. Yes iOS is fully multitasking, only user apps are restricted in their multitasking privileges by the sand boxing system, but background services have none if those limitations.
It was limitations like this that meant projects like Courier would never have been able to compete with iOS. It's why Microsoft had no choice but to develop an entirely new OS core for their mobile platform, losing crucial years of competitiveness.
Google was lucky. Although Android was never originally intended to use multitouch gestures or an accelerated UI layer, at least it was based on a Linux core so had the fundamental technical underpinnings to support competitive application level services. This gave Android a few years head start on Microsoft, even though they were a few years behind Apple, just enough for them to occupy the low end of the market and eventually mount a credible challenge in the mid and high end.
// The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.
And the fact that the old windows phones crashed daily. Was riddled with bugs (some never got fixed) and from an accessibility point of view was a terrible piece of hardware. Good riddance.
Apple made the smart phone easy to use, and gave it much needed elegance. Over night it turned the smart phone market into a consumer smart phone market.
> The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use
The iPhone (and smartphones in general) have disrupted multiple markets:
* Photography and video
* Portable music players
* Email and messaging devices
* Phones
... and many others
The thought I ran into many times with many people during this "disruption" period basically went along the lines of:
"I could buy a new camera, a video camera, a new iPod, a netbook, GPS device, etc - or I could just get an iPhone."
This theory doesn't stroke the egos of iPhone owners enough to be popular on Apple blogs. It also leaves them open to Android taking it further because cheap compromise devices are easier to make than magical high-end disruptors.
I also felt that the iPhone was a disruptive product. But it took this article to help me articulate the reasons why.
In all of Christensen's examples cited in “The Innovator’s Solution”, the incumbents tended to move upmarket at the time the disruption was introduced. In the case of the cellphone industry, the incumbents were moving downmarket.
This is important because it shows that a company wanting to disrupt an industry needs to position themselves at the opposite end of the prevailing market direction.
But simply zagging while the industry is zigging isn't enough - the disrupting company also needs to employ the appropriate strategy at the same time. Hence, if your disruption is targeted to the cheap end of the market, then Christensen's "good enough" strategy is absolutely the correct one. But, if your disruption is targeted to the high end of the market, as Apple's iPhone was, then you better be offering a degree of quality that no one dreamed of offering.
This kind of deflates Christensen's compelling rhetoric somewhat. Before Christensen's books, conventional marketing was that in order to succeed, you should see where the industry is headed, and track in the opposite direction. Position yourself against your competitors, not be like them.
While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance
I wonder if BlackBerry would've prospered by doubling down on enterprise buyers, maintaining their keyboards, and ignoring the consumer market. From what I can tell, BlackBerry haphazardly attacked the consumer market where Apple was the strongest.
I can only speak anecdotally here, but in my experience as an IOS contractor if blackberry had doubled down on enterprise buyers, it wouldn't have mattered. Top executives were buying iphones despite the enterprise features, and they were forcing their internal IT departments to make room for them. It's also the reason that so many enterprise apps are made for iphone while android is ignored, the top brass want to see their companies app on their smartphone.
This. Not to mention anecdotally the ego contests involved (e.g. my friend is on the board of Big Name Cultural Institution and they have a really nice iOS app). Of course, Big Name Cultural Institution has a budget 10x yours. But really having an iPhone app was a status symbol. It has since become a critical business need but back in 2010 it was mostly about board member's egos.
This is correct. As someone who was programing a "mobile website" targetting the company's fleet of blackberries, it was clear the blackberries days were numbered. A fortune 500 company blackberries were king, but my boss made sure that we testing on ios/andriod as we starting to see non blackberry phones at work. The non blackberry phones were from higher ups who could push for support.
Didn't work[1]: when the CEO of your company demands that IT let him use his iPhone, then no amount of IT-friendly features is going to keep your enterprise a Blackberry only shop.
[1] To some extent Blackberry did this. While they did launch consumer models, their enterprise sales force remained strong, and new enterprise-friendly features kept shipping.
In my opinion, this is exactly what they should have done. They should have focused on providing value to businesses that the iPhone couldn't, and then incessantly emphasized those features to their enterprise customers.
Yes and then with the improvements to activesync in 2007/2010 the iPhone and Android devices had good enough security and monitoring for most organizations.
If you stick to a very literal reading of Christensen, the iPhone was disruptive to the PC market, but was simply a much better smartphone that its competitors. A product can be both better and worse depending on what you compare it to.
I wonder what differentiates a disruptive product from a better product? It seems like the qualities you listed are hallmarks of all good products, right?
It's really a pretty specific idea initially coined in Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma."
From the book, via Wikipedia:
"Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."
So the canonical example would be PCs disrupting the market for mainframes or minicomputers. Or as described in the book, less powerful hydraulic excavators disrupting steam-powered excavators. It's a good book, anyone who is interested in the business of technology should read it.
The contradiction is that disruptive products are usually much worse products than the ones they eventually replace. No one who owned a VAX or a mainframe looked at the first IBM PCs and thought that the PC was a "better" product. But the PC started cheaper, stayed cheaper and got better fast enough to displace minicomputers while at the same time opening up an entirely new market for computers that didn't exist before.
So much of this hinges on how you define what "disruptive" means. There's an argument to be made that the iPhone started the trend of phones & tablets disrupting the entire desktop PC industry, starting as "worse" products that eventually replaced the "better" product. I personally don't think you could really say the iPhone "disrupted" Blackberry per se - their relationship is more like early Compaq to IBM where Compaq/Apple put out a much better product that broke down barriers holding the original product back (e.g. Compaq decoupling bus speed from processor speed allowing them to ship a faster computer with an ISA-compatible bus for expansion cards).
So while I will be the first to admit that I certainly didn't predict the iPhone, some of the iPhone's success was based on Apple leveraging their success with the iPod. The existence of iTunes and an ecosystem of third-party accessories based on the Apple 30-pin connector certainly helped the iPhone, not to mention Apple's brand cachet which was on an upswing at the time.
it's an interesting thought experiment to consider if the iPhone would have succeeded if instead of Apple it had been put out by, say, Danger.
1) The ecosystem did not spring into life with the iPhone; a lot of vendors were unsure initially but there was obviously tremendous benefit to Apple due to the iPod industry.
2) Danger would not have been able to launch the iPhone for a multitude of reasons. Even as a part of Microsoft, they couldn't have done it. I could go really in-depth here, but Microsoft is really bad at Art and Politics, which I would argue were the keys to the iPhones success.
3) The iPhone is a triumph for a number of reasons, but I tend to think the social conventions the iPhone destroyed were the most interesting part. I mean, I was working at AT&T when the iPhone dropped.
Before the iPhone:
* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end
* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones
* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS
* No one ever waited for a phone
* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX
* Phones sold on spec sheets
After the iPhone:
* Most people forget that the iPhone launched at a price point of $499 with no subsidy. They failed but this was Apple's attempt to kill free phones, and they (sort of) did.
* App store (year 2)
* Manufacturers drove handset sales to Operators (and outside of operators)
* People line up for phones all the time
* Everyone cares about UI/UX
* Phones sell by Operating System (And UI/UX)
I could go on and on. There are so many things that changed because of design decisions by Cupertino.
No, Danger could not have done the iPhone. Not because of technical limitations, but because of politics. Wresting that much power out of such a reinforced fiefdom was a herculean effort with commensurate results.
How much was the palm? $199 on contract? It certainly wasn't $499...
Those companies had their own OS but their content, schema and layouts were dictated by carriers. Only phones that were sold outside of carrier shops enjoyed true independence and those were few and far between.
People praised the Nokia UI, but where could you buy a high end Nokia phone when they were locked out of US carriers?
Spec sheets sold. Things like battery life were more important than OS. I think we're in agreement here.
I just think we had a different viewpoint on the industry. I sold thousands - tens of thousands of phones in the mid 2000's so I'm really familiar with the market at that time, but the view from my position is not a consumer viewpoint.
This does not seem in line with the understanding of the word used in The Innovator's Dilemma, the book that popularized the word in a business sense. Guyzero's response above matches much more closely to it.
Normally, I'd agree, but in the case of the iPhone, the disruption was more profound than simple off-the-shelf components.
I can go into detail, but the standard ideas for Disruption tend to be technical in nature whereas the iPhone was a profound multi-faceted assault on the world. There are so many elements of this attack, it's hard to know where to begin, but it was certainly more than just a newfound set of components (a lot of the iPhones physical technology was not new).
But, I hear and agree with your point. Guyzero makes a great post above and it's certainly worth reading :).
I had to laugh when I read this. How can I not upvote something so good-natured, especially when it's a response to blunt HN criticism like I delivered?
Re-defining what is a well-defined english word using hipster-startup-hack-bias is contrived and self-fulfilling. The phone caused disruption in the world, done, done, and done. Now quit trying to fit the word disrupt into every conversation. Products create a rift, or they don't. Products are worth their value, or they're not. There's no magical "disrupt" criteria to satisfy the startup hivemind rubric.
Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.
Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around here that it's become something of a pseudo-intellectual discussion starter.
While I agree that the term is overused, in its genesis of popularity, it referred to a real (and previously unnamed) phenomenon: wben an un-(or less-)profitable market eats a more-profitable one, such that players in the grown-up market are misled by listening to their customers.
If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.
And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.
Here's a blog post arguing that the iPhone wasn't disruptive, like PC vs mainframe - the PC was worse in every respect, but it was also dramatically cheaper.
Instead, it was obsoletive, like PC vs typewriters - the PC was way more expensive, but could do so much more, and once you had a PC it didn't make much sense to have a typewriter too.
I suspect that it often boils down to marketing. A company selling you something somewhat better wants you to be thrilled and think it is revolutionizing everything, not "hmm this is somewhat better, I might prefer this if it doesn't cost too much more." Which may be the reality of many things which get called "disruptive".
Example: Series2 TiVo - couldn't do HD like some of the cable set-top boxes, but was the first mainstream DVR and I much preferred watching a 30m show in 20m over "HD".
Blackberry's was the case of being too much in love with their own beliefs and processes. Also known as inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Microsoft also has those tendencies but they tend to get their act somewhat together even if that's too late.
Lazaridis saw the iPhone and the Engineer in him went - the battery won't last and it will bring down the AT&T network with its full fledged browser. Ballmer saw the iPhone and laughed at the $500 price. Both did not see the potential from a changing market's standpoint. Battery tech gets better, hardware, networks and OSes get better every year, and the prices can and do fall.
But some of it was inevitable for Blackberry. There really wasn't any differentiation potential left behind for them. iPhone got the smooth, attractive, computer replacement part. Android got the customizable, ubiquitous, many options, open and the "not iPhone" part. There just wasn't any way for BB to differentiate and win. They could've had a perfectly smooth touch optimized OS with great BB hardware, security suite and BBM etc. and even then their target market would still be limited.
The only way they could've saved themselves was if they had innovated ahead of time. After the iPhone and Android it was game over for them.
I think it also would have been hideously difficult for BB to dev, market and sell two entirely different kinds of devices.
I think there's really been 3 kinds of smartphones:
1) The Microsoft model - shrink a desktop down into a phone display and since everything is so little now, use a stylus to pick at things on the screen. You can definitely see an older MS smartphone and still see it as being a smartphone.
2) The BB model - optimize for most common use-cases and provide a dedicated set of physical inputs to operate. These days, feature phones pretty much do everything a BB can do, but the interface into the capabilities suck. The classic BB phone is very much a feature phone on steroids. A nicer screen, better input but good hardware build quality and excellent email services. It turns out that turing machines are turing machines and BB eventually figured out you can run other kinds of apps on the devices, but their pedigree is very much an amped up feature phone.
3) The iPhone model. Grids and capacitive touchscreens. Let's be honest here, Android started as a copy of the BB model, early Android phones even had a similar set of input mechanisms.
The iPhone model is interesting in that it was just like the Microsoft model in the sense that it was just a cheap portable computing device where "phone" was just an application on the computer. But unlike Microsoft they didn't just take the obvious route of just shrinking down the desktop into an unusable and fussy tiny screen. They developed a different kind of interface.
Also, if you squint just a tiny little bit, it looks kinda like the mobile interface model that BB used, but instead of a wheel or ball or whatever to navigate and a keyboard to type, they simplified and just did everything on a bigger screen.
Pulling these two influences together into what we have now, and being willing to deal with the tradeoffs (lack of precision input and the "feel" of a keyboard + the reduced battery life and added component cost) was really innovative and daring. It was so impressive that Google completely redirected and pivoted Android from the BB model to the iPhone model.
I think that BB should have done two things... First, double-down on enterprise customers. Second, offer BB branded applications for iOS and Android phones. They could have been best-in-breed applications, and still kept devices with physical keyboards for their enterprise/die-hard customers.
They had a feature set that was early on, unmatched, and enough developer insight/knowledge and codebase that they could have beat other competitors at the application level for integrated contact/calendar/mail solutions for exchange integration.
One of Blackberry's key barriers to innovation was that they were unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue. It was quite substantial revenue, so I would understand the beancounters' reticence.
To connect a Blackberry to your own mail server, you needed expensive software and the enterprise level of network service. While BB did start to offer consumer data plans, you could not use them with your own mail server. When the iPhone came to Canada, I did the math and traded the blackberry for an iPhone.
If they had bought QNX early and switched to either a recent Java version or another decent language - even something like webOS HTML5/JS/CSS would've worked given a sane looking UI and frameworks.
I wish I could find the quote but there's a long discussion by a former-RIM employee about the inability of management to come to consensus.
To my mind, that's also incredibly ironic because RIM had the dual-CEOs for specifically this reason, to avoid conflict over technical and operational requirements.
Disruptive products as initially defined are reliant on advances in technology to become good enough to challenge established markets (while they advanced via emerging/self-created markets).
Apple was always biding their time, waiting for the right moment for a giant leap forward in consumer satisfaction to become possible; it's the opposite of the incrementalism of the usual disruptive product.
Few companies would consider such an approach because it seems to be a much, much bigger risk, leaping so far forward in consumer satisfaction that you are practically creating a new market.
But there is an enormous leverage opportunity created when you take this approach:
A visionary new product can generate a lot of marketing leverage from a strong sales pitch. It really is better. Using a strong sales pitch for an established "me too" product doesn't generate a lot of marketing leverage. And Apple had the head visionary as head salesperson.
The flip side of the potential sales pitch leverage is that the product can likely only be sold via strong sales pitch. It's too new.
So the best positioned company to take advantage of the strong selling opportunities of the Apple approach is one with a strong brand as an innovator. Upstarts or stodgy old companies won't know how to really pitch the product compellingly, or will be at too large a disadvantage from their non-existent/badly matched brand.
I worry that Apple with Jobs gone will forget to sell their next big innovation strongly enough, and will just rely on their existing customer base and strong brand. It will probably only work well the first time (existing huge base/incredible brand).
I say "I worry" because I want Apple to continue creating products that are great leaps forward, and I don't think they can do so perpetually without acknowledging the huge role that a really strong sales pitch plays in the success of such products.
Apple was trying and failing for many years. Now they have found a bigger niche in little electronic devices. Good for them! But let's not pretend the earlier failures were all intended as some kind of grand strategy. Apple is not a perfect unicorn. It's just another company, selling products.
I'm pretty sure there was a plan at the very beginning of the Jobs era, to get the Mac line profitable again just to keep the company going long enough to go after new and different product lines. About a year before returning to Apple, Steve Jobs even publicly outlined this strategy:
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
-- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
The interesting thing about this is that the original iPhone was barely something that could be called a success. It sold 6.1 Million phones over 5 quarters. The recent launch was 9 Million in 3 days. They sold 50% more phones in a weekend than they did in 450 days. Reports of Apple's death are exaggerated I think.
Ok, if we're using this framework, here are some interesting thought experiments:
(1) What is Google Glass disrupting? What are the faulty assumptions about it? ("iPhone was a pocket Mac, not a better phone. Google Glasses is a ____, not a ?")
(2) What are the AI / Machine Learning disrupting? (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, MS) ("AI is a ____, not a ?")
(3) What are the Kiva Systems robots disrupting? ("Kiva System robots is a ____, not warehouse automation? Not ?")
(4) What are 3D Printers disrupting? Certainly not mass-production factories.
2) Education and reference resources. I now longer have to spend hours and hours looking up information and synthesizing it myself, I can get an AI to do it for me. (crossing fingers that it synthesizes it like I want it to)
3) Thieving, lazy, sloppy warehouse workers (no offense). The amount of stuff that gets stolen and "missing" out of fulfillment centers is astronomical. Plus, it's basically a a task that doesn't require human level intelligence. What do I need to ship? Where is it? Is it in stock?
4) Service Bureaus and Machine Shops. Prototyping physical things is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of skill to do. When making any kind of physical thing, the equivalent of compiling and debugging, is to run off a prototype at a Bureau. It's so onerous a problem that very few organizations even bother to make more than half a dozen physical prototypes of an item before committing to production. In the end, it'll probably just mean more variety of cheap junk we can buy off of Amazon.
(2) and (3) are interesting responses. But I don't think it is actually using the key insight described in this article. That key insight being that people compare it to what's come before, and that comparison becomes a blinder for it's actual advantages.
(4) will happen, but I think the scope is far too small; again it also has the blinders that does not take advantage of the key insight from the article. With 3D printers, you wouldn't buy products off of Amazon so much as buy licenses to fabrication blueprints to print out a product in your garage, similar to the way you can now buy ebooks, digital music, and digital movies from Amazon without the physical product.
4 - I...somewhat disagree. I spent a few weeks looking into current and future 3d printing tech, and outside of some very limited use-cases would I consider that the output quality and materials mix from any 3d printing tech to be a threat to traditional manufacturing.
It's a nice idea, but it's just very very far away from happening.
Even relatively simple items right now are not something that are even close to being duplicable in any current or emerging 3d printing tech.
For example, there is nothing on the horizon that will enable me to 3d print the equivalent of a working $5 104-key keyboard.
Now if I want to buy all the electronics and internals and spend a few hours printing and assembling a custom keyboard (because my time is free right?) then yeah, I might be able to 3d print something of use.
I'm actually looking around my office now and every thing I see fits into 1 of two categories
a) Not feasible to 3d print the item e.g. a keyboard
b) Cheaper to buy it and get it some other way e.g. the red Solo cup I'm drinking some water out of
That's a great point, and illustrates that blinder effect discussed in the article. The Blackberry executives and engineers also did not think that the iphone would sell well at a higher price point and a lower battery life.
My point in bring up all of this is that the key insight in this article is not about disruption, but about refactoring your base assumptions. When you see 3D printers as to what is really is, but has not yet been, then you start to see other technologies that are coming together to be able to fabricate things in your garage. Yes, that does include being able to print circuitry directly into the printer -- and yes, there are people working on that right now.
This is a lot closer to happening than you think it is :-)
Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors.
Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted.
Shopping: price comparisons in physical shops will be automatic, and no longer make you look like a dick.
Sports: Any team sports will be changed by the immediate knowledge of where all your team is. Any endurance sport will change with the zero-effort monitoring of your vital statistics[1].
Dating: All those "mobile dating apps" that work in theory but kind of fail in the real world might actually have a chance (assuming people get used to people wearing Glass and no longer laugh at them)
By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more.
By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.
A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.
"By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more."
Haha, that's a nice piece of rhetorical sophistry.
It is good to keep an open mind on the different possibilities. However, the art of strategic thinking requires you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Until you can fill in that blank, you can't make decisions right now and place your bets.
That is the point of this exercise. There is a key insight in the article, and it can be applied to something like the Google Glasses. If you cannot discern it, you're more likely to be running off of unexamined emotions instead of a vision of what's to come.
I think the disruption potential is easy to see, but predicting it's success impossible, because it depends almost entirely on the company's execution over the course of many years.
For example tons of people were super excited in 2007 because they had a full unix computer in their pockets. Some had the iPhone and some had a Nokia N810. The difference of course is that Apple remained focused and executed very well over the next 5 years whereas Nokia...
To use Glass as an example, it's simple: it wants to be the primary UI to your data and apps. Today you look at the output on the screen and feed it input via voice and the touch thingy, in a decade it reads your brainwaves. People aren't wed to tapping on flat rectangles any more than they were wed to keyboards and styluses.
But whether it's successful or not? No one knows, because it depends entirely on what Google does over the next 5-10 years.
Google Glass is, ideally, the new smartphone. In the sense that it could change how people interact with the world in much the same way that smartphones did, but at the next level. A more personal, immediate level.
It's not just a smartphone stuck on your face. It's your constant link to all the information you need.
Isn't the point of using this frame of thought that one needs to look beyond? Just as, "iphones are not better phones, they are computing devices", then wouldn't it be, "Google glasses are not better smartphones, they are ____ ?"
Launched products are disruptive when they start taking over functionality that other products were once doing. Google Glass is, for now, a publicity vehicle to show that Google is forward thinking.
Only when the product is launched will we learn whether it is disruptive.
Good article, good to see someone who appreciates how strong Apple's strategy really is, rather than just hating.
A nice comment somewhere in this thread about CEOs of corps competing to get the best app - Apple managed to turn the iPhone into arguably the premier ego-arena on the planet. A characteristic which gives iOS an allure which should not be underestimated, unless you happen to enjoy being crushed like a bug.
Do you mean pro-Apple as in a fanboy who thinks everything Apple does is great, or pro-Apple as in he appreciates and respects their design chops and business acumen?
Neither really. Pro-Apple in that he is willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. If they make a decision he doesn't understand or agree with, he will figure out some acceptable reason they would do that he can agree with. Someone who is anti-Apple would look at the same facts and come up with a reason they are incorrect, for doing the same thing.
Essentially, I would be shocked if Asymco had a post saying he disagreed with Apple's strategy.
Mr Lazaridis and the ridiculous dual-CEO structure are significant contributors to the failure of Blackberry. I have friends there and not one believed that he would be as prescient as saying "If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia".
The first iPhone was the disruptive product. Everything after that has been incrementalism. The 2013 iPhone 5 is a direct descendent of the 2007 iPhone 5, and the 2007 iPhone 5 was almost a completely different product than my 2006 Treo 700w.
This article is based on the false premise that somebody with deep knowledge can predict disruptors.
I'll tell you why talking heads/pundits/experts couldn't predict, because they are useless, and the whole business of market disruption prediction is built on a ridiculous premise.
Who cares whether something is disruptive or not? Does it make any difference at all? Are you trying to crack some formula to making disruptive products, because it ain't gonna work.
I hesitate to agree with this article given that that hindsight is 20/20. If anything, you could mark the decline of the BlackBerry with the introduction of the iPad.
>The striking thing is how the two companies peaked are almost precisely the same time and how that moment (end of 2010) was not related to the entry timing of their nominal disruptor[iPhone].
Could it be that it was Android that hurt Blackberry and Nokia more than the iPhone did? Low end Android phones definitely replaced a lot of Symbian phones in the marketplace. It would certainly explain the timing of the change.
>The idea that Apple is vulnerable to the low end is a relic of an idea.
Not seeing how this follows from the data and analysis and seems to be a rather bold claim. There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized and it has already happened to a certain extent in China and India, where local OEMs are calling the shots.
The reason it's not happening in the US to the same extent is that the carriers hide the true cost of the flagship phones into two year data contracts, unlike, say PCs. However, the contract free prepaid market is growing at a record pace [1] and we may see a real change in the marketplace if the trend continues. Is the upgrade to S4 or the 5s from the S3 or 4S worth $500?
Could it be that it was Android that hurt Blackberry and Nokia more than the iPhone did? Low end Android phones definitely replaced a lot of Symbian phones in the marketplace. It would certainly explain the timing of the change.
The point isn't whether it was Android or iPhone (for the record, the Droid campaign started fall 2009). The notion of getting disrupted by higher cost phones--not iPhone for a Symbian but a smart phone for a flip phone--was so unthinkable and invisible that for three years the two companies under discussion here made do selling to emerging markets. It's essentially a tale of how the market and leadership at these companies do not see disruptions from above coming, and if they do see them coming being in a paradoxical state of needing to reverse course on a (thus far) successful strategy.
Not seeing how this follows from the data... There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized
Nobody is arguing that smart phones haven't been commoditized. The question is, how viable is a business that does not serve the low end? According to critics who are not keen on the nuances between these different products, a high-end play is not viable at all. But this is ignorant of the history of the Mac and iPod. It's also ignorant of the fate of PC-era commodity players.
By the way, I love the last sentence of Horace's piece here: "That’s not likely to be the case for those who found themselves in competition with the Mac in its pocketable re-incaration."--he's hinting at the possibility that these scary "commodity players," even if they see success, set themselves up poorly for the next round of disruption. Apple's whole-widget approach uniquely set it up to introduce disruptive form factors, and might do so again in the future.
>Not seeing how this follows from the data and analysis and seems to be a rather bold claim. There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized and it has already happened to a certain extent in China and India, where local OEMs are calling the shots.
I spend time in both countries you mention and couple more in Asia. Local OEMs are calling the shots because market as a whole is growing. But, the smarter OEMs realize that they have to make phones that are less shoddy. That is why you see brands like Oppo. What I have seen in the last couple of years is that as people get busier, they don't have time or patience to handle rubbish phones. They will not mind spending more money to get an iPhone or a Mac. Many analysts in the west try to say something like we Asians buy these gadgets as a status symbol. It might be true to a certain extent, but more people are getting them these because they are tired of cheap and crappy devices.
Couldn't agree more with both points. Of course android ate Nokia's pie (cheap phones for everyone). Rather unsure about blackberry, i think thats more a thing that android and ios both now have excellent infrastructure integration (MS exchange etc) for corporate support.
You're also right with how cheap OEM android phones are taking over the market. iOS is losing marketshare pretty much everywhere where phones are not heavily subsidised or the comparative income is low, namely everywhere but the US and UK (and a couple of others). Unless apple drops its ios prices to more reasonable levels (they are really taking the p*ss), it's going to be the same story as the one that unfolded with mac/windows.
Whilst I agree that Nokia and Blackberry were disrupted by Android, not the iPhone, Apple is gaining customers everywhere. 'Marketshare' is a flawed concept because it assumes a unified market of undifferentiated customers. Apple is simply not in the market of commodity devices. It never had any of that market to lose. Claiming that apple is losing those customers is clearly incorrect.
If the story does unfold as it did with Mac/Windows, Apple will again be the clear winner, just as they are in the PC market.
Apple is not the 'clear winner' in the PC market, they are a small segment of it.
Working in corporate and government environments is an Apple free zone.
Lower price competitors have repeatedly caught up and outperformed higher priced vertical companies that make the entire stack. Android is well positioned to do exactly this to Apple over the next decade. Phones and cheaper devices also seem to see this happen repeatedly. Apple's phone division should see a warning in Nokia and RIM, not a comfort.
SGI, Sun, Commodore, Atari, DEC and many others are all defunct. All full stack companies.
Apple and IBM are left. IBM mainframes are extremely difficult to remove. Apple are easier but may survive with enough iOS lock in.
> Apple is not the 'clear winner' in the PC market, they are a small segment of it.
Yet Apple has the most profitable segment of the PC market, they make more profit on PCs than any if their competitors; it turns out Mac-free corp/gov zones are not very profitable.
Apple will keep dominating the high end of even developing markets, their profits will keep rising and they will continue not to be disrupted by Android, who seem to have trouble making money (sans Samsung). I would worry more about HTC going under than Apple.
Corporate and government is profitable. It's just that the profits are shared by a plethora of companies. Apple failed long ago to get a foothold and gave up.
Apple don't dominate the high end of phones by market share any more. They do make more money out of it than anyone else at the moment. Good for shareholders but consumers are largely indifferent to profitability.
If HTC and Samsung went bankrupt Android would still be OK. They'd be replaced.
Sorry - this has nothing to do with the profits being shared by a plethora of companies. Apple receives almost half of the profits in the PC market. The rest is divided between your plethora. Apple chose not to serve the unprofitable part of the market.
Apple have tried to get into corporate environments. They tried to sell Macs to everyone.
Corporate computing is bigger than just buying PCs. Oracle, IBM, service companies, MS, Intel, CA, Cisco and all these companies make masses of money in corporate environments.
Yes, but how are he PC makers doing who serve the corps: say Dell, HP, Lenovo? Unless they make a dash for services, and even that is iffy (HP should have had some advantage here), they are all pretty much toast.
You're right that low price is a great competitive edge, but one can name many now defunct computer makers that were anything but full stack -- Compaq, Gateway, eMachine, Packard Bell, Siemens (the PC maker), Olivetti. As a matter of fact, one can argue that they went under because their products didn't stand out from the competition.
Full stack can be seen as a great advantage. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't make Surface or acquire Nokia. It all depends on specific business cases.
Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength. Most people are not fussed if they buy an HP, Sony, Compaq, ASUS, Acer, MSI or whatever for a PC. Android buyers can happily switch between a dozen manufacturers as well.
The point is for general purpose computing full stack was common but is now exceptional. If it was a great advantage surely there would be more full stack companies around.
You seemed to imply that SGI, Sun, etc are gone because they were full stack. I just offered counterexamples of non full stack companies that are also gone. There are simply no evidence that full stack is inherently bad, or vice versa. It's all specific to individual companies.
> Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength
Or more precisely, that's a benefit of hardware commodity. From the business perspective however, it isn't fun to be a loser, full stack or not.
There is evidence that full stack is hard to keep going. In general computing devices there are only 2 companies left doing it that matter. IBM & Apple.
The non-full stack companies that are gone have been replaced.
The full stack ones have been replaced by combinations of non full stack companies.
New non-full stack companies come in and get big. What new full stack company that matters that has been started in the past decade?
You are contradicting yourself. You say that fill stack companies are hard to keep going and yet you say that non-full stack companies come and go even more easily.
By your logic, non-full stack companies are even harder to keep going.
It's not a contradiction. Both are hard to keep going. Full stack ones are even harder. Hence all but 2 are gone.
The ecosystems for more open systems are also really durable.
Personally, watching for decades the most surprising thing is that MS has kept the desktop rather than losing it to Linux.
Would you say that MS has 'won' the server market because they make more money than any Linux company even though Linux has a largest market share of internet servers?
MS keeping the desktop rather than losing it to Linux contradicts your thesis. You can dismiss it as a 'surprise' or acknowledge that your reasoning doesn't accord with reality.
We're taking about people who sell PCs, not component vendors. If we include windows, we also should include intel and everyone else in the supply chain. But since this whole topic is about manufacturers who ship complete phones to purchasers, the analogy in the PC market is with companies that ship complete PCs.
It's worth noting that even Christensen didn't think the iPhone would be a success.[0]
[0] http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/