Disruption

05/11/14

At some point I'm going to do a post on disruption.

Disruption is now one of those business buzzwords. It doesn't get the respect it deserves. It's a great concept, and it's pretty throughly defined by the man who coined the term, Clayton Christensen.

A lot of stuff is labelled disruption, but there's an easy heuristic to see if it is or not: is the targetted consumer underserved by the competition? Even better: is the targeted consumer uninteresting?

If not, then you aren't disruptive. You're probably just a crappy alternative to the competition. Which is half of what disruptive innovations are, but the other half is the important half.

A disruptive product needs to serve a crappy customer. A customer that the competition is not worried about losing.

Under this lens, it is easy to see how something like the Ouya wasn't disruptive. Who was the Ouya targetting? As a Kickstarted project, it was targetting passionate gaming enthuists.

Those gaming enthuists ended up pretty disappointed. They bought a crappy product.

I guess I just did a post on disruption.... Huh.

At some point I'll do a good post on disruption.