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I would really like to know why this was downvoted.


Probably because your statement didn't include any rationale for your disagreement, and specifically didn't address his direct claim, which is that each of these was better than the alternative at their genesis. In disruption as described by Christensen, a market is being overserved by an incumbent relative to the needs of buyers, and the disruptor offers a somewhat worse product at a dramatically lower price, not a BETTER product. Google was superior to Yahoo along every dimension. Uber was a dramatically better experience than a taxi, and was also MORE EXPENSIVE.


good point. uber and online dating both lacked the network to be superior initially. it's hard to say what industry search engines disrupted... (libraries, yellow pages, encyclopedias, travel agents?) but in 1998 when google was founded, they indexed 26 million pages.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.h...

Here is the original google: http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-google-serv...

Regarding the statement Google was always superior to yahoo... it would be nice to have a timeframe, because Google provided Yahoo's results as late as 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

My point is that the author is a mainstream adopter and is comparing the mainstream products to their counterparts that they disrupted.




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