Nokia’s leadership was also big fans of this book in 2000-2010. They saw themselves as the nimble disrupters, eventually eating away all computing markets with their cheap plastic phones and a smartphone OS derived from embedded systems. If Nokia would just keep adding features, the Christensen theory promised that they’ll one day own the upscale markets too, like in all those case studies in the book.
Instead Nokia’s business was destroyed by actual innovation: Apple combined a new kind of mobile UI with an OS derived from high-end PCs. It didn’t fit on the ladders of innovation shown in the book. It wasn’t a cheaper thing becoming good enough, but an expensive thing that was nearly impossible to manufacture initially. And that’s why Nokia thought they could safely ignore it, until it was too late.