Dear Mr Malstrom,
First of all, I am sorry for the quality of my English, as I am French and do not really master the language.
A few days ago, I heard about your blog when reading Internet gaming forums about the PS Move and the 3DS. I have one thing to tell you : how blind I was ! I really felt you were talking about me when you mentioned the former players who did not to play anymore until the Wii. The fact is that after my SNES, games did not feel the same to me, and then I bought a DS and a Wii, and games are now starting to have the flavor they should always have had.
But the real point of my email is the following : is disruption only a business concept ? Reading your articles, I came to think that ecology first appealed to people who did not feel concerned about the current system’s values. Ecology then got refined in sustainable development and started to apply in new fields of concern, resulting in more and more people adopting this view.
Do you think ecology and sustainable development (not sustainable in terms of just improving, but in creating things that last long) could be disruptive ?
Thank you very much for your answer and for having given me the will to learn more about those concepts of disruption and blue ocean.
Clayton Christenson’s concepts of disruption apply only in business, and there is a reason for this.
One of the problems with disruption is that people enjoy the concept so much they begin to apply it to everything. Perhaps that is how it goes with new meaningful ideas. When Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity, people tried to apply it to everything and say, “That is relative,” and “That over there is relative.”
With disruption, people have a habit of applying disruption to everything. “My car is disruptive.” “My cat is disruptive.” “I am a disruptive man!” Christenson has complained about this.
So the antidote to this is to keep any discussion of disruption anchored to the texts (much of which is available online). Sure, we can unroot disruption and mean it to be whatever we want. But aren’t we just wasting our time if we do that? The reason why I don’t think it is a good idea to try to apply disruption outside of business is because you’ll likely uproot disruption to mean something it isn’t and end up wasting your time.
Some people think that a product ‘must’ be disruptive in order to be a success. That isn’t true. Disruption depends entirely on the market’s needs. A window for disruption occurs only when the market is overshot. So during the 16-bit generation, most customers were underserved. They were not overshot by the graphics. So there was no window for disruption at that time. Sustaining innovations were correct.
Disruption requires an incumbent. What is the product disrupting? The iPhone wasn’t disruptive. It wasn’t disrupting anything else. It was, essentially, a better smartphone. That doesn’t mean the iPhone wasn’t exciting, wasn’t cool, wasn’t a good product.
Christenson came up with disruption because he noticed a pattern how business leaders, using what they learned in business schools, make the correct moves by ‘making a better product’ with sustaining models. Then, their businesses would collapse to upstart disruptors. Christenson figured out a long puzzle as to why a business can be doomed if it just keeps making a ‘better product’.
And just because a product is disruptive doesn’t mean it will ‘win’. Netscape tried to disrupt Windows and look what happened there. Netbooks tried to disrupt computers and Microsoft rapidly responded by throwing XP at a very cheap price on the machines. Christenson developed this further by talking about the Sword and Shield of the disruptor concerning asymmetric values.
I’m saddened that so many people want to take disruption out of its business context because the business context is so much fun. I love business! Business is all about winners and losers, like any sport. However, unlike a sport, business does change the world and our civilization. The good businessman is an odd fellow. He is very rare. He talks like a truck driver. He isn’t well ‘schooled’. He is very brave. And he knows Human Nature like the back of his hand. I learned more about Human Nature from studying business than I ever did from psychology, from literature, or from philosophy.
Here is a funny example of what I mean. This fictional example of a business owner going to college really brings out the contrast between the reality of the real world versus the artificial academic setting. And businessmen I know do have the mannerisms of a truck driver. What a hoot.
This is such an entertaining movie. Let us watch another scene.
In the above sequence, it is another clash between reality (represented by Dangerfield) and the fake universe the ‘party’ is in. I have seen this ‘clash’ in reality and I am like, “My God! I love these businessmen!”The reality they live in is so much fun.
Now, the above were comedy routines, but humor is funny only when it is true.
The reason why I like the business of gaming is even though games are silly amusement products, the business is very cutthroat and very, very few people survive. Just look at this generation, alone, and see how in a few years how one company, Nintendo, was said to be unable to compete and about to leave the console business completely changed the game. In a few years, now Nintendo is on top and Microsoft and Sony are in trouble. Of course, the tables could be flipped around again. I get more entertainment looking at the business side of gaming than I do from the games themselves. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing!
