The Myth of Disruptive Technology
People love a good, unified explanation for the ways things are. One current favorite is the concept of disruptive technology, a coinage and concept put forth by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and explained in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. This guy has so many honors that apparently whatever he says is gospel. The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium.
A disruptive technology is defined as a low-performance, less expensive technology that enters a heated-up scene where the established technology is outpacing people's ability to adapt to it. The new technology gains a foothold, continues to improve, and then bumps the older, once-better technology into oblivion. Sounds good. The problem is that there is not one example of this ever happening. When boiled down, the notion is essentially a rewrite of the adage Adam Osborne devised to explain the mediocrity of the Osborne 1: "Adequacy is sufficient."
The theory goes on and on, with a seemingly reasoned explanation of how this unfolds. Christensen says the idea stems from his fascination with the collapse of Digital Equipment Corp. Eureka! The microcomputer came along as the cheap, inferior, disruptive technology, eventually supplanting the mini. "Throw out the VAX, Gomez, we've got an Apple II!"
No matter that the CEO of DEC was a screwball who thought advertising was only for proving to your mom that you worked for a real company. No matter that HP, IBM, and Sun continued to prosper selling "minicomputers"—though Sun has a zany CEO too!
The microcomputer was never a "less expensive" and "inferior" replacement for minicomputers. It was a more expensive and superior replacement for calculators and slide rules. It was never used "instead of" a minicomputer (or mainframe for that matter) but "in addition to."
Even the spreadsheet, which is what actually made the desktop computer popular, had no real antecedent except a pad and pen. It didn't replace anything better. It was new.
In the Harvard Business School alumni bulletin highlighting this nonsense, there is a list of supposedly disruptive technologies. Not one is disruptive. At the top of the list are electric cars supplanting gasoline vehicles. On what planet? Internet sales supplanting bookstores. Hmm, Barnes & Noble is packed with people. Restaurants are being affected by the disruptive technology of grocers' takeout. Are you laughing yet? Motorcycles being affected by the disruptive technology of dirt bikes—does anyone see a pattern here? Is this an April Fools' gag?
James Burke's marvelous PBS TV series Connections offers a better explanation for disruption. When there is true disruption, it comes from inventions, regulatory and social change, complementary technologies, coincidence, and demand.
The closest Christensen comes to a real disruptive technology is digital photography. But it was invented in 1972 and has never been "cheaper" than film. The atom bomb is surely disruptive, but neither cheaper nor inferior. The car replaced the horse, but it costs more, and it became a success because of the invention of pavement and the pneumatic tire; asphalt was never cheaper than or inferior to dirt.
There is no such thing as a disruptive technology. There are inventions and new ideas, many of which fail while others succeed. That's it. This concept only services venture capitalists who need a new term for the PowerPoint show to sucker investors.
One could almost make an argument for Linux as a disruptive technology. It's free, so that helps. But what is it disrupting? Microsoft? In 1992, when Linux was invented, Microsoft had about $2.2 billion in the bank. Now Microsoft has over $70 billion in the bank and continues to grow. Some disruption.
One problem in our society is the increasing popularity of false-premise concepts that are blindly used for decision making. The amount of money squandered during the dot-com era because of "paradigm shifts" and "new economies" is staggering. People actually believed that all retailing would be online and that all groceries would be delivered to the home as they were in the 1920s, despite changes that make delivery impractical. Who cares about reality? We have a disruptive technology at work!
The concept of disruptive technology is not the only daft idea floating around to be lapped up obediently by the business community. There are others. But the way these dingbat bromides go unchallenged makes you wonder whether anyone can think independently anymore.
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