Tuesday, March 02, 2004

This ain't disruptive anything, it's called listening to your customers

Once again the word disruptive has been misused in this Technology Review article entitled: Disruptive Incrementalism. Disruptive technology is really about how to develop a technology for a niche market, make money off of it and then expand it into the very competitive markets. The article describes just the opposite, how does one go directly into the mass market and tweak some minor attributes of the product to make it widely successful (that is until people figure out the rechargeable batteries are not replaceable). Anyway, this is as if I were to claim that our in-house task manager had been disruptively adopted within our little outfit because one day, the developer decided to implement a simple library on top of it. The mere set up of that library opened the door to something not seen before: i.e. the user could now upload document to it and send an http address to people they wanted to show the document to. No more large E-mail attachments, no more setting up of a web site for the purpose of sharing information within a project, no more need for FTPs, no duplication of files in so many different computers, no need to go thru murphy's law a day before presentation (because a hard drive failed)....This was not disruptive, rather in one small increment, it answered many different unfulfilled and most importantly unindentified needs. The developer was listening to its customer. Now this application could really be disruptive in that it could be sold to very small companies. We are trying to figure out what would be the selling point...

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