Big-Bang Disruption

hbr.org

17 pointsbpolania4 comments

If it's not big-bang like described here, it's not really disruption IMO. There's a difference between evolution and revolution.

One is taking little steps that the incumbent can see as they come, and thus the game is a balance between nimble/fast and resourceful/slow. A gap-spotting game: who fills each niche in the industry first?

The other is as he alludes to: collateral damage from a wrecking ball. Someone invents a pocket sized device that has GPS and can download maps. Not because they were trying to do that, it just happened. Now nobody ever needs a GPS device anymore. Or a paper map.

When your battery runs out, you'll wish you had a paper map.

Maybe, but my kids won't. They've never seen one.

Even old busted partial tech is better than a black LCD or even with bad reception, since you don't even know when you'll have bits of data. I'm starting to think that our 'old' world is actually a massively distributed, redundant, fault tolerant information system, just not an electronic one.

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