

The Disruption Machine - steveklabnik
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine?currentPage=all

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mgav
Excerpt:

"In his original research, Christensen established the cutoff for measuring a
company’s success or failure as 1989 and explained that “ ‘successful firms’
were arbitrarily defined as those which achieved more than fifty million
dollars in revenues in constant 1987 dollars in any single year between 1977
and 1989—even if they subsequently withdrew from the market.” Much of the
theory of disruptive innovation rests on this arbitrary definition of success.
In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and
1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S.
competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year
Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,”

Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues
of nine billion dollars. Last year, Seagate shipped its two-billionth disk
drive. Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant
disrupters, on the other hand, no longer exist, their success having been in
some cases brief and in others illusory. (The fleeting nature of their success
is, of course, perfectly consistent with his model.)"

