
Not disruptive, and proud of it - pchristensen
http://blog.asmartbear.com/not-disruptive.html
======
davidw
Part of what Christensen (any relation, pchristensen?) talks about in The
Innovator's Dilemma, which covers disruptive technologies (
[http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-
dil...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dilemma-the-
revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-collins-business-
essentials) ) is that more often than not, incremental improvements are
dominated by existing companies, because they're operating in a space they're
comfortable, and good, in. This makes it difficult for new companies to
compete.

Now, there's a lot to be discussed there, and a huge need for actual
statistics, but I think the idea isn't without merit.

~~~
pchristensen
Actually, Clayton Christensen is my great-uncle (my father's cousin). I've
only met him once though.

~~~
timf
Cool.

So as an aside, I think your great-uncle would be your grandfather's brother
but this would be your "first cousin once-removed"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CousinTree.svg>

(and thanks for the opportunity to brush up on that :-), it's confusing)

~~~
pchristensen
Touche. I thought I had that down but I got sloppy.

------
pg
"Simple, modest goals are most likely to succeed, and most likely to make us
happy."

That's certainly true for 99% of people, but someone trying to start a startup
has already declared by doing so that they are not part of that 99%.

I think for some people it's ok to have ambitious goals.

~~~
smartbear
Come on Paul -- trying for a more likely outcome of being a single-digit
millionaire instead of an unlikely outcome of being a triple-digit millionaire
doesn't make you "not ambitious."

I'm not saying it's bad to swing for the fences! Just that many people do out
of perceived necessity.

~~~
pg
I find that the founders who have ambitious goals rarely express them by
numbers of digits, which are extremely hard to predict, but more often by how
much they want to change the world. For example, the founders of Reddit, which
was a disruptive innovation of the classic type, had as their slogan "freedom
from the press."

~~~
houseabsolute
I wonder if in the end the irony of having that slogan and being acquired by
Conde escaped any of them. Or the irony that maybe the press is not the
darkest master to which to be enslaved.

~~~
pg
The slogan refers to _users'_ freedom to get information where they like, and
that wasn't impaired at all by the acquisition. As far as I know, Conde Nast
only once tried to dictate what was on Reddit, and that blew up in their
faces.

~~~
houseabsolute
> users' freedom to get information where they like

As far as I can tell users already had that freedom without Reddit. In fact,
as a link aggregator, the most Reddit could be said to have added was a
directory of that freedom. Such directories were already well and alive on
sites like Digg and Slashdot (in different forms, to be sure). It's hard to
see what about that is disruptive.

But, whatever, it's just a slogan.

------
terra_t
If you're a new entrant in a field, you don't usually have a choice.

I think of some non-disruptive spaces, such as job shops that make web sites
for other businesses, that are boring businesses... boring businesses because
they never get big, and because a number of factors work towards their
inevitable senescence. There's a low barrier to entry, margins are low, and
there's no possibility of making a killing.

Now, it would be wonderful to have an incumbent business that dominates a
space and commands ludicrously high margins: like, say, Salesforce.com. The
trouble is that you've got to ~have~ that business. Unless you've got some way
to claw your way up, that's about as practical as chosing to have rich
parents.

Salesforce.com got that business by being disruptive, by being disruptive to
traditional CRM software. At $250 /month*set, Salesforce.com is 'affordable'
as a CRM product, since that's a fraction of what you pay the salesperson. As
a cloud computing platform, however, Salesforce.com is absurdly expensive and
highly limited.

If Facebook couldn't provision similar (but less reliable) services for 1/1000
the price, there wouldn't be any Facebook. Pretty obviously there's a market
for a platform that's maybe a factor of 10 or so cheaper than Salesforce.com
that's still pretty reliable.

Somebody who wants to get into the cloud space isn't going to get the high
margins Salesforce.com gets... They've got no choice but to be disruptive.

~~~
patio11
_Somebody who wants to get into the cloud space isn't going to get the high
margins Salesforce.com gets_

Salesforce has _atrocious_ margins. They're consistently below 10%.

------
tkiley
"Disruptive" is popular because it implies the product or service can generate
value on a large scale without playing catchup to existing market leaders.

If you're going to make an incrementally improvement, you have to first catch
up to the pack, and in an established industry, this can be (or at least seem)
cost-prohibitive and risky. "Disruptive" startups, in theory, do an end-run
around the barriers to entry.

The article suggests that we replace disruptiveness with usefulness as a
criteria for evaluating startups. I think we need both; disruptiveness ensures
the startup has a fighting chance against the incumbents, and usefulness
ensures the startup has a market.

Incidentally, several of the author's supporting arguments can be applied to
the term "useful" as well. "Most technology we now consider 'useful' wasn't
conceived that way", "the creators of useful technology often don't make the
money".

~~~
astine
That assumes that the product or service that you are providing needs to
duplicate the efforts of established players in order to be useful. What if,
instead, your product or service worked _as an add-on_ to existing products?
Like, for example, all those Twitter apps. They don't replace or compete with
Twitter (currently) but they do provide additional functionality.

What if your product is genuinely new, but doesn't fundamentally change the
way people live or do business?

~~~
tkiley
True, complements to existing products can avoid typical barriers to entry for
non-disruptive products, but they come with their own set of issues. Generally
speaking, they are at high risk of being absorbed into the products they
complement. Xobni -> outlook, facebook apps -> facebook, etc.

------
maxklein
In my opinion, people don't get to really disrupt. Disruption happens.

How many video sharing websites existed before youtube - quite a lot. Before
facebook, quite a lot of social networking sites.

What happens is that someone does something that has already been tried in a
somewhat different manner, and this particular combination hits on that
particular thing that makes it grow rapidly, and with the rapid growth comes
the disruption.

It's like ChatRoulette. You couldn't have done this successfully before now,
cos flash just was not ready for this.

It's very difficult to sit down and plan disruption, because even things that
are obvious now are not obvious at all before they exist.

------
Mz
Funny, I have spent years trying incredibly hard to be less "disruptive".

I typically do things way outside the norm and it is socially disruptive which
then creates an atmosphere where it is impossible to keep talking about what I
do. Yes, I have done some radical things in terms of coming up with solutions
where others say something can't be done at all but I had no goal of upsetting
anyone by sharing that information, much less upsetting the status quo. I have
found that people tend to split up into roughly two groups: Those folks that
act like I'm the second coming of Jesus Christ and those folks that act like I
am a liar, charlatan, and snake oil salesman. I recently concluded that the
older accusations against me that I was "egomaniacal" imply that people think
it can be done, just not by me whereas the accusation of "liar, charlatan, and
snake oil salesman" means they think it simply cannot be done at all, by
anyone. Period.

I still need to figure out how to turn it into a business model and make money
off of it so folks can coo over me being "disruptive" instead of pointing
fingers over it. At least that's the theory.

------
dennisgorelik
Disruptive and incremental can go together: incremental improvements may cause
disruptive change in the market.

~~~
hawk
In particular, markets with several large, slow-moving, and undifferentiated
competitors (e.g. telecom).

------
chrischen
Twitter purpose was hidden but not absent. MSN messenger has always had a
feature letting you change your display name. Naturally people started using
this as a status message. This has been the case since the early days of msn
messenger well before Twitter. Just because someone doesn't understand a
disruptive technology doesn't mean it's need or utility can't be simply
explained. It just means he or she has a poor grasp on the idea's utility.

------
joubert
I think disruptive starts when you have a big idea of how to change an
industry, a political system, a society. Aiming to be disruptive (in this
sense) is a valuable goal, since a big idea (put a computer on every desk;
organize the world's information) provides the direction that helps you lead
and not simply react to market conditions.

So I don't think it useful to chase technology which you think might be
disruptive, but rather see how you can change peoples' lives, and then figure
out how to do it,

------
deyan
I disagree with the article. Except in some rare occasions, startups have 80%+
chance of failure. If that's the kind of risk you are assuming, then making
big swings is the only reasonable bet.

That's why existing companies innovate incrementally for the most part too -
they are better suited for tackling lower risk problems and will crush
undercapitalized startups. Which is why "not disruptive, and proud of it"
sounds like bad advice for startups to me.

Clayton Christensen's books (Innovator's Dilemma, Innovator's Solution) talk a
lot about these issues. I will be adding them to my Startup Lore
(<http://www.deyanvitanov.com>) as well in the next few weeks.

~~~
dennisgorelik
Startup's chance of failure depend on how disruptive that startup wants to be.
The more disruptive startup's goals are -- the higher change of failure.

------
samratjp
Perhaps, the truly disruptive companies don't even start out necessarily
knowing they are going to be disruptive but instead just grow into it. By the
author's observation of the word change from "paradigm shift" to "disruptive,"
this makes sense, for the great scientists (technologies and other ideas
included) didn't necessarily know they were "disrupting" when they discovered
(or invent) something.

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bitwize
Nothing much new here: selling sugar water (or point-of-sale or
restaurant/garage/insurance agency/medical clinic/etc. management apps or
whatever) > changing the world, at least from a stable, reliable income
perspective.

But what of your _soul_ , man?

------
garply
I was reading some advice from one of the Forbes 400 and he said something
like: 'Start off trying for singles. Then go for doubles and triples.'

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mechanician
I guess I'm curious what the line is between disruptive and incremental,
assuming of course they are only separated by a line.

~~~
davidw
The wikipedia page isn't bad, although it doesn't talk about what
'incremental' is. It lists enough 'disruptive' things to give you a general
idea, though:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology>

------
eli_s
Great article.

keeping this advice in mind can help alleviate entrepreneur paralysis; instead
of wasting time trying to discover the next big thing, just pick an industry
which you have some interest in and improve existing tools in some way
(through automation, usability improvements, pricing etc.)

