To All:
Charlie Rose, last night, interviewed Harvard business professor and author of "The Innovator's Dilemma" in which he explains why our Gorilla and Kings (and leaders in other industries as well) will, one day, be forced to do the wrong thing...
His thesis: As leading companies listen more and more closely to their biggest and best customers, the least among their customers begin to find their needs overmet...until another, smaller innovator, with a smaller, more to their point solution, begins to take them away. The product may not be as good, but over time, it gets better, drawing away more and more of the larger firm's customer group.
The major companies, structurally unable to respond, are forced to give up in the lower areas. Their alternative is to concede that their product is wrong for the littler guy, and develop a new one to meet the threat from the small competitor. Most companies fail to do so....he cites Digital for it's innovation versus IBM, and it's failure to meet the similar challenge versus the PC.
Thinking back through my magazine career, I saw that happen over and over...leading magazines losing market share to groups of smaller ones that more cost effectively, only targeted slices of the larger's circulation.
Christensen also thinks Java is one day going to be a credible threat to MSFT, but he gives Softie high marks for it's positioning moves, and he points out that Intel's Celeron chip was the courageous and correct answer to National, AMD, Citrix, etc. Not all companies can do it, and most of them don't even see it coming until it's too late. He calls these "disruptive technologies."
Another example he gives is one going on now...Bloomberg being made obsolete by the rapidly improving offerings to investors, and eventually brokers, over the internet. There's little they can do, he says, except watch it happen.
I'm going to get the book. It may help me learn to do some of that forward thinking we were talking about a few days ago. |
