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Friday, Feb 01, 2002

disruption

"What can all companies take away from your study of the newspaper industry and its response to the Internet challenge?

Again, disruption creates net total growth. As I work with so many companies responding to disruptive technology, their overwhelming response is to focus on the potential losses created by disruption. In fact, the time from when a disruptive technology initially emerges to the time it eventually attacks an established market can be quite substantial. In the mainframe computer example, minicomputers were launched in 1967, and even though unit sales quickly passed mainframe unit sales, dollar sales did not eclipse mainframe sales until the late 1980s. Mainframe dollar sales did not have double year declines until the early 1990s. Thus, both markets continued to grow for some time after the initial emergence of the disruptive technology."

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