- Joined
- Apr 8, 2008
- Messages
- 19,883
- Reaction score
- 5,120
- Location
- 0.0, -2.3 on the Political Compass
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Other
The Innovator's Dilemma is a book by Clayton Christensen.
The basic premise is how big, successful companies go about doing their business in all the right ways but decline by failing to see how smaller rivals can disrupt their business.
Good examples are the ones Christensen mentions primarily, such as how small steel mills took over the low margin rebar business from the big mills and eventually innovated up until there was nothing left to disrupt, causing the big steel mills endless problems.
Another is how Andy Grove, Intel's CEO had a talk with Christensen about his theory and put into place the Celeron Processor to prevent Cynix and AMD from doing the same thing to Intel. Seems that Grove didn't quite see ARM processors in the same way though and ARM manufacturers like Qualcomm have been eating Intel's lunch lately, disrupting their business on the mobile side.
Right now, I personally see Android being the serious disruptor for Apple. It's already gotten to the point where Android phones are taking larger and larger chunks of the high margin business. Tim Cook seems to realize this is happening with the tablet market and thus why the iPad Mini came out chasing both the Amazon Kindle and the Google Nexus. The rumors about a Retina iPad Mini seems to suggest that Tim Cook is taking this threat seriously to the point he's willing to sacrifice significant margin (as well stock price) to disrupt the disruptor. The rumored low cost iPhone at this point seems like a token gesture as the high end smartphone market has already been disrupted.
So what are your thoughts? Has Apple gone from being the disruptor to the disruptee?
The basic premise is how big, successful companies go about doing their business in all the right ways but decline by failing to see how smaller rivals can disrupt their business.
Good examples are the ones Christensen mentions primarily, such as how small steel mills took over the low margin rebar business from the big mills and eventually innovated up until there was nothing left to disrupt, causing the big steel mills endless problems.
Another is how Andy Grove, Intel's CEO had a talk with Christensen about his theory and put into place the Celeron Processor to prevent Cynix and AMD from doing the same thing to Intel. Seems that Grove didn't quite see ARM processors in the same way though and ARM manufacturers like Qualcomm have been eating Intel's lunch lately, disrupting their business on the mobile side.
Right now, I personally see Android being the serious disruptor for Apple. It's already gotten to the point where Android phones are taking larger and larger chunks of the high margin business. Tim Cook seems to realize this is happening with the tablet market and thus why the iPad Mini came out chasing both the Amazon Kindle and the Google Nexus. The rumors about a Retina iPad Mini seems to suggest that Tim Cook is taking this threat seriously to the point he's willing to sacrifice significant margin (as well stock price) to disrupt the disruptor. The rumored low cost iPhone at this point seems like a token gesture as the high end smartphone market has already been disrupted.
So what are your thoughts? Has Apple gone from being the disruptor to the disruptee?