[reposted from HBR Blogs] To this day, Microsoft Office remains the dominant office software suite, a position it has held since the 1990s. While competitors have emerged to appeal to different customer niches (Google Docs with collaboration or iWork for Mac users), for many people the value of using Office lies in the fact that …
Do founders insure against disruption?
I listened to a very interesting a16z podcast on disruption that involved a conversation with Clay Christensen and Marc Andreessen. They cover lots of topics but the part that interested me was when Andreessen was talking about what he perceived to be a fast disruptive cycle in Silicon Valley. (I am not so sure about …
Digitization and the Rise of Trump
An interesting thesis has emerged about the rise of Donald Trump and it comes from Clay Shirky. For fun, he tweeted an entire essay about the subject and you can read those here. His argument is simple. Rather than the two parties deciding who will be their presidential nominee, the Internet and social media have …
A Taste of Disruption
In the lead-up to the launch of The Disruption Dilemma (just one month away, pre-order here for hardcover, Kindle and audiobook), I wrote a couple of expository papers that have just been published in Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. The one in Sloan Management Review is free to access today and is called …
Precognitive Antitrust and Disruption
One of the things I have been saying about disruption is that when it potentially arises what potentially disrupted incumbents will try and do is acquire the disruptive entrant rather than be disrupted by them. Consequently, incumbents have an important tool in their arsenal that can be deployed if they face existent threats. This was …
Is Uber disruptive?
It is almost strange to be asking the question. Ask any cab driver and they will equate Uber to any disruptive child you care to present. But, of course, it is precisely because the term 'disruption' has multiple connotations that this question can be asked. Indeed, for Clay Christensen, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald in …
Traditional disruption theory and predictions
Regular readers will know that I have been focussed on disruption as a phenomenon where successful firms fail precisely because they pursue the good strategies that made them successful in the first place. My forthcoming book deals exclusively with that issue. But there is a group of people -- mostly outside of academia -- who …
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The Disruption Dilemma: Available for Pre-Order
My latest book, The Disruption Dilemma, is now available for pre-order on Amazon (hard-cover only). It will be published by MIT Press in March 2016 and there will be an electronic version available by then. The book arose out of a blog post I wrote last year but also as part of a desire to …
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Disrupting the Theory of Disruption
Last week, the Sloan Management Review published a study by Andy King and Baljir Baatartogtokh that re-examined the success record of Clay Christensen's theory of disruption. They took 77 claims/predictions of disruption and asked experts to evaluate whether what happened to those companies was consistent with the theory of disruptive innovation. They found scant support. …
Google Plus exemplifies why self-disruption doesn't work
Google is slowly but clearly shuttering Google Plus; its latest failed social network. In many respects this is not a surprise. As I wrote upon its launch in 2011, Google Plus demonstrated precisely why Google didn't get social as it, by default, asked people to think about restricting their social activity rather than by encouraging …
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Digitopoly 