thinkdisruptive

Almost none, unless it was something I'd read every day + found more than 1/2 articles relevant + useful. Won't even pay for NYT if only 5 or 6 articles/month add significant value.

We need a subscription business model that aggregates content like cable/pay tv, so I can pay a fair price once, and continue grazing across most sites without worrying about individual subscriptions or micropayments. WSJ and Economist are only sources I would pay for (at a reasonable price) that aren't providing specific data points I can use. And, most people wouldn't find those as useful as I do, so it's down to personal preferences and how much of any source you'll get value from.

It's why individual subscriptions to everything is a dead-in-the-water business model that's going to kill off most journals. Most sites will be abandoned if there is a paywall.

Think about it this way -- how many people would pay for The History Channel or HGTV as individual add-on tv channels? Yet a very large number of people will occasionally watch those sources if it's included in general subscription, and they add value to the overall package, even if you rarely watch them. That's the way I view 99% of online content.

And, you have to make it dead easy, and not be constantly harrassing me about subscriptions or micropayments, or I'm gone. And, I also expect sites I'm paying for to be ad-free and not slowing down my browser, or I won't pay.

I appreciate that. I got called an "Apple fanboy" and worse at the time. Ironically, I didn't own any Apple products when I wrote this, and still don't have an iPhone (even though Blackberry is getting killed by the iPhone and now Android), I needed a cell plan that included Canada, which AT&T didn't have, and that one thing saved me several hundred dollars per month by going with another carrier and a Blackberry.

The important thing to remember is it comes down to customer needs. If most people needed what I did, the iPhone would have flopped solely because of the exclusive arrangement with AT&T. But, it clearly was a game changer. That's hard to dispute today.

Wow, thanks Justin. Nice to see my old analysis getting new play. In hindsight, I think this illustrates perfectly how there are dimensions other than "performance" (which is pretty hard to define anyway) on which you can come in below the competition, and "low cost" as levers to disrupt markets. The iPod and iPhone are both illustrative of how if other other important problems are solved for the customer, you can still disrupt a market with a high price. Christensen has described this as a non-conforming exception to disruption theory, but I think it conforms perfectly, as the article you posted describes. Thanks for giving it extra visibility.

Yes, this is absolutely an example of the disruptor being disrupted. RIM has killed themselves by trying to out-increment features on a handheld email machine all the while ignoring, or failing to perceive as relevant how both iPhone and Android were irreversibly changing the basis of competition.

RIM's only survival strategy is to stop playing catchup with me-too products that the market has already passed, and to offer something different leveraging their proprietary platform if possible, but satisfying and targeting a completely different market need, such as doing mobile social more elegantly or something like that. I'm in process of writing a detailed analysis of RIM's missteps that have enabled disruption, and why their current strategy is pointing them to oblivion. This article is killer for RIM -- only 26% of Blackberry owners plan to get another! http://tiny.cc/iphone5_kills_the_pack

@IssaacL. You are right that most people don't know what a disruptive innovation is. That derives from too many believing that it means "innovation" of any kind, or "better" than anything else in the market because they equate the endgame (the disruptor usually ends up with dominant market share and the best product, but only after many product cycles) with what creates disruption, and they aren't the same thing.

However, your brief definition skims over way too much of the theory. Disruptions don't always have to be cheaper or "worse" in the qualitative way that is generally understood. To disrupt, an innovation simply needs to be substantially better on a dimension that the new market cares about, while being referentially worse (compared with incumbents) on a dimension that the existing market and incumbent producers care about strongly (and therefore aren't incented to compete against the disruptor until it's too late).

This is a completely consistent with Christensen, and also with market reality. However, Christensen was wrong about the car because he didn't follow his own logic. Do you see buggy and horse whip manufacturers anymore? Do you see people raising horses for transportation? How about trains as the primary (dominant) form of mechanical overland transport of goods and people? Cars were initially "worse" in that they spewed lots of dirty soot into the air, required fueling stations that didn't exist, could only drive on paved roads (which also didn't exist), and broke down constantly (which meant everyone that drove one had to be a mechanic). But, motorized vehicles were also superior in that they could go faster for very long periods of time without needing rest, they were cheaper per mile to operate than a team of horses, and they were fun to drive, offering a sense of freedom. Cars disrupted lots of things -- you just have to identify the right market and the cause of its disruption.

The fact that the very first cars were really more hobbyist or wealthy-man's toys is irrelevant -- so were PCs until they became economical and found their niche through VisiCalc spreadsheets.

The fact that Christensen wrote the seminal books and made the observations from which the theories were derived doesn't mean either that he is always right, nor that he always applies the theories correctly to predict disruption. He famously declared both the iPod and the iPhone to be not disruptive at their introduction, yet they are archetypal examples of disruption.

In 1949, Thomas Watson Sr, IBM's then president famously declared that he couldn't envision a need for more than 12 computers to satisfy the needs of the entire world. Sometimes we're too close to things to see the forest for the trees.

Also, the Wikipedia article has been overwrought by many techies who think it's about technology, and as such isn't an entirely accurate or good summary of disruptive innovation. In that respect, you are correct -- technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for disruption to occur, but correct market segmentation and positioning strategy, having the minimum viable feature set to satisfy an unmet or underserved need, targeting a market slice that is willing to pay to have its problem solved at a price that you can afford to make it are all critical properties of disruptive innovations, and they are entirely about marketing and business model, not about technology.

Still, we all know that the majority of disruptions are enabled by new technology because it can create opportunities to solve unmet needs at a price point acceptable to an unserved market.

I don't know if that better answers the original question, but it is sometimes, although not frequently the case that disruptive innovations are more expensive than what they replace. The iPhone is a great example of this, as is the original IBM PC which was far more expensive than the PCs that came out of the late 70s, but had the big advantage of IBM's imprimatur endorsing it plus an open architecture, which attracted apps and an ecosystem of vendors springing up to support it.

There is an ebook discussing the widespread misunderstanding of disruptive innovation and why it matters available at http://tiny.cc/disruptve_confusion_ebook