I agree with you in your assessment that the primary disruption occurred in the delivery of a widely accessible hardware platform. People could take this ubiquitous, wide-open platform, slap in whatever code they could dream up, and completely displace the incumbent players. But why? Because of the cost. People wouldn’t have left mixing boards and PBX systems if the cost to the consumer had been equitable. (I’ll resist the urge here to run off on a tangent about the disruptive nature of moving our spreadsheet/word processing code back off of the PC…)

Now, the to the disruption in software… In pointing to those open source projects, I should have been more clear in my explanation. I wasn’t trying to say that Apache was a disruptive code base by virtue of the way in which it delivered web pages. Rather, I believe that open source creation of software is disruptive to proprietary models of software creation. Obviously, this is not always true, but I tried to list some examples where open source software had displaced the incumbent, proprietary, players. In those cases, the open source software wasn’t very good when it started, but it evolved and eventually became “good enough” to displace the paid model. Almost no one today would buy Windows Server just for its ability to function as a web server. If you need to serve web pages, the free product is more than good enough. Open source development has usurped proprietary development in that space. It is no longer a viable commercial space. Just like, as pointed out by Christensen, manufacturers of 5 inch hard drives no longer have a viable commercial space.

I’ll close with a question, and promise I’ll not bother you further! Do you think we will be installing Microsoft Office 2015 on our local machines because, let’s face it, the on-line free junk that Google offers simply doesn’t meet our needs?

1. Asterisk and Audacity - I think these are disrupting hardware competitors. The disruptor isn’t really software, but rather the PC itself. Every PBX is software plus a hardware platform. The innovation is in bringing software to a general purpose computing platform. I think the same thing is true of digital editing suites and mixing boards — the precursors to Audacity. To me, these are both part of the same disruption wave that Microsoft is riding, which is the PC wave.

2. Apache and MySQL are undoubtedly cheaper, but I think of them as open source competitors to established products. Remember that Apache and Microsoft’s IIS, for example, are the same vintage. Both went after the same untapped market, which was web servers, and the effect of both were to cannibilize Sun’s expensive proprietary hardware. I’d argue, again, that these are still riding the PC wave.

3. Filezilla is interesting as a tool, but again, secure FTP is simply an incremental improvement. The most valuable improvement in FTP for me has been the introduction by Microsoft of graphical FTP in Windows Vista.

Because software is “just bits”, I don’t think it’s like other kinds of disruptible industries. I think the real threat to Microsoft is not an Innovators Dilemma threat, but rather what Clair illuminates, which is a network effect. Once a lot of people are using Basecamp, for example, to manage projects, it becomes difficult to displace them precisely because the tool isn’t vulnerable to the same techniques that were used to displace PC tools. Microsoft’s only defense is to pre-empt those companies before they gain critical mass…

My understanding of the central thesis was not relative to manufacturing/marginal cost, rather in the cost to the consumer.

Existing technology continues to upgrade (innovate) in an evolutionary manner disregarding the requirements of the market. Eventually, the product has capabilities that far exceed the needs of the average user. (what percent of the features of Word and Excel do the typical user utilize?) Nonetheless, people keep using it because it is the best way to meet their needs.

Meanwhile, the disruptive technology is introduced, but it is so primitive that it cannot meet the needs of most users (GoogleDocs anyone?) So it putters along with its own series of evolutionary upgrades that everyone pretty well ignores. Until one day….someone looks again and realizes, “hey, this does everything I need without all the extra bells and whistles that I never use. AND IT’S FREE!!!” Commence disruption.

As for a disruptive software case, could we argue that the Open Source movement has been disruptive on various levels? Apache, Asterisk, MySQL, Audacity, FileZilla come to mind.

Vis a vis the Innovators Dilemma, the comparison works in as much as Google is coming to market with a much simpler and cheaper solution. That’s also where it falls apart. The Innovators Dilemma is, in large part, about how a simpler solution with a much lower cost of manufacturer can disrupt a more powerful existing solution. Yet we all know that the incremental marginal cost of software is $0. Is it a coincidence that so far we haven’t seen a real Innovators Dilemma disruption in software… is it possible the model doesn’t work in that environment?

AND… You are most probably right that the Redmondians are thinking in terms of the Innovators Dilemma. When the book was published in 1997, I bought copies for all my staff at Microsoft and encouraged them to read it.

First the criticism - I cannot take seriously any post the references ValleyRag :)

Second the comment - I agree completely with any and all who argue that GoogleDocs provides but a shadow of the functionality of MS Office.

But…for those who have read The Innovator’s Dilemma, doesn’t the comparison between the two fit absolutely perfectly with Christensen’s description of disruptive technology? I believe it does. Furthermore, I think the folks in Redmond believe it too. Watch their strategic movements over the next couple of years with that framework in the back of your mind and see if it doesn’t appear that way.