
The Undoing of Disruption - edtechdev
https://chronicle.com/article/The-Undoing-of-Disruption/233101/?key=QD1yIFY4MSBAMX9naz5HMD8HaCNvMR5yYXMba3kiblpTGA==
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nz
A strange article. Many of the things cited as proof that the theory has poor
predictive power are really dependent on how narrow of a scope you're willing
to ascribe to industries and sectors.

For example Christensen stated that the iPhone wouldn't be a disruptive
technology because it is essentially a very high end phone. This turned out to
be a predictive miss on Christensen's part, not because the iPhone succeeded
in spite of being a high-end phone, but because Christensen mis-categorized
it: it's a very low-end personal computer.

Furthermore, the article uses the HDD market as an example. It states that
1.8" is not the dominant form-factor today as Christensen predicted it would
be (instead 2.5" and 3.5" are). However, the article doesn't state whether the
analysis took into account the SSD market (I don't have data on the SSD form-
factors but all of my laptops have a 1.8" SSD, for what it's worth).

The main problem with the theory's predictive power is that it hinges on being
able to accurately categorize companies/products as being part of a particular
_industry_ or _sector_. Where does the cell phone industry end and the
personal computing industry begin? Are HDDs and SSDs considered to be in
_different_ industries, and why? What about railroads and air travel? The
lines between industries are blurry at best.

Obviously everything is connected, and the theory is more about predicting the
long-term macro-economic interactions between companies/players and the
market. Instead of drawing S-curves and looking at industries and sectors
(which are really just arbitrary, imperfect categorizations that don't take
overlap into account) one should look at which players are stealing other
players' low-end customers. That's likely to be indicative of a disruption-in-
progress.

