disruption

9:00 to 10:15 Being Back. How California came to disrupt

The disruptive history of California is remarkable. Whereas few nations can claim credit to one, California is home to at least four major disruptions: Semiconductors, recorded entertainment, venture capital and personal computing. And it did all this in less than one century. If any one place can vie for the title of "serial disruptor" it's California. One success can be seen as luck, but many successes imply a system is at work. In this case session we discuss California's disruptive history and put forward hypotheses on the what causal mechanisms are at work. We ask further whether California can still be the home of future disruptions or whether the system has broken down.

• The effect of "frontier mentality" on unforeseen growth
• The effect of migration and diaspora on innovation and counter-effect of the absence of either.
• Applying these causal themes to the management of innovation in institutions

10:15 to 10:30 Break

10:30 to 12:00 Designed in California, Assembled in China

Geographically and culturally, California is closer to Asia than any other western market. It has always faced west more than it has faced east. Is there a symbiosis between California and Asia? Are its institutions adapting to a new center of economic mass? Is California leading in thinking or culture or is it being disrupted by a new frontier as growth moves east?

• The growth in Asia and China in particular is in many ways a reflection of rapid industrialization. But it can also be seen as a low-end disruption.
• What can be learned about business model innovation in the contrast between Californian and Asian approaches to business?
• Does culture play a part in an innovation mentality?

12:00 to 1:00 Lunch

1:00 to 2:15 Guest presentations and Panel session

Guests are invited to debate or discuss points raised during the morning sessions. A chance for panelists to challenge or refute points made as well as for the provision of anecdotal evidence.

Potential panelists:

• Ben Bajarin
• Michael Lopp (aka @Rands)
• Jean-Louis Gassée
• Om Malik
• Charlie Kindel
• Dan Benjamin
• Philip Elmer-DeWitt
• Tim Bradshaw

2:15 to 2:30 Break

2:30 to 4:00 North vs. South

Does the tension between industries of Northern California and Southern California reflect an opportunity or a crisis? We will re-visit the narrative of what Entertainment is hired to do. We will review the differences and similarities of the technological creative process vs. the artistic creative process. We will see whether industrialized, commercialized art is subject to disruptive forces or whether there is persistent exceptionalism at work.

• Is the intersection of "liberal arts" and "engineering" more than a metaphor?
• What can be learned by cross-pollination of the creative processes of engineers and artists.
• What's the future of technology-based entertainment? Are North and South closer and have more in common than the war talk lets on?

4:00 to 6:00 Reception

Please register here.

We don't want to just make a new phone. We want to make a much better phone.

- Jony Ive, video at iPhone 5 launch event

Disruption theory has taught us that the greatest danger facing a company is making a product better than it needs to be. There are numerous incentives for making products better but few incentives to re-directing improvements away from the prevailing basis of competition.

This danger is more acute for technology companies. Coupling incentives with the speed of improvement in various technologies (aka Moore's law) means that over-service can come suddenly and more quickly than warnings from the marketplace. A product can tip from under- to over-shooting the market within one product cycle. One year the product is under-performing and trying to catch up to the competition and the next it's superfluous and commoditized. The dilemma is compounded by the cycle time of development which can span multiple product cycles.

Therefore, how to tell whether a product is over-serving a market is one of the most important and frequently asked questions I get asked. It's easy to see over-service in the rear view mirror when looking at a multi-year pattern. The trouble is that by the time you see the data, it's too late. How do you tell you're on the cusp of good enough, subject to imminent disruption before you get there?

I consider measuring a product's absorbability to be a marketing problem. The marketer's job is to read the signals from the market[1]. Determining absorbability comes down to reading two market signals, both of which must be met before green-lighting an improvement:  (a) a product's improvements must be used and (b) a product's improvements must be valued.

If a product's improvements are not used and the buyer will not pay more for them then they are not being absorbed and the effort to develop the improvements should be redirected.

Now the problem becomes one of measurement. Of the two, utilization is easier. Data can be gathered on whether a feature is being used. Research methods exist to tell if a feature would be used even if it's not available[2]

The more difficult assessment is that of the value of a feature. You can usually only tell value by trying to price it and watching what happens. For example, you add more speed/memory/capacity and try charging more (or the same) for the product. The acceptance will be measured by sales growth and will give you an indication of whether these improvements are valuable.

If you have to add features and drop prices at the same time then it's likely that the market does not value the improvement.

But this is extremely risky. You need to wait through a sales cycle and iterate through a development cycle before you have an answer. In a space where competitors are placing opposite bets, the experiment fails even if you get the data.

How can you structure a value measurement experiment without wasting an opportunity?

Rather than dealing with hypotheticals, let's use the iPhone as a test case. As Jony Ive states, the focus for the latest iPhone was to make it better. Is this improvement absorbable? What happens if Apple's bet on being better is wrong?

First, we can confirm that the iPhone has been on a trajectory of getting better and that those improvements have been absorbed so far. We can measure the history of performance of the product (roughly doubling every year) and we can also measure proxies for performance as I have in the following charts:

As the product has been improved along these dimensions, sales have increased and prices have held steady (even rising occasionally.)

The question is about the future: what about the latest "5" variant?

The clue to this experiment is the presence of a control group.  We could test the question of absorbability by keeping a version of the product which did not improve (or got cheaper) and measuring whether it performs better vs. the "improved" version.

Of course, this is exactly what Apple does with the n-1 generation products. By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued.

If sales of the n-1 variant were to increase relative to the new version then they can understand when they are at the point of good enough. The experiment is brilliant because the margin on the older products is maintained even at the lower price point.

We don't have public data on the performance of the old vs. the new but some studies show that, at least in some markets, the older variants have, so far, been a minor part of the sales mix. The CIRP study from early this year showed that about 90% of holiday iPhone sales in the US we for the latest (4S) variant. If this pattern persists globally and for the 5 then the improvements can be said to be valued.

If the new features (as represented by the metrics charted above) also get broad engagement--data which Apple can easily obtain--then the iPhone 5 can be declared not good enough. The company can then comfortably work on improving it further.

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1. Note that the marketer's job is to listen not to talk.
2. e.g. contextual inquiry.

With the launch of the Wii console, Nintendo averted disaster. When the Wii launched in late 2006 Nintendo had been facing the simultaneous attack from the "seventh generation" Xbox 360 which launched a year earlier as well as the PlayStation 3, both of which set as their bases of competition 3D graphics at HD resolutions. Many wrote off the company and called the console market a two horse race.

Then, in what seemed a desperate downward leap, the Wii was launched into a different trajectory. It addressed non-consumers with a new, more intuitive controller and standard resolution rather than competing for hardcore gamers with more power and richer graphics.

Because the Wii was asymmetric and addressed non-consumption rather than trying to be a "better" console in what was becoming a horsepower race, Nintendo expanded the console market. Its innovation was interesting enough that many hard core gamers used the console in addition to a PS3 or Xbox and many non-gamers bought it as their first console.

The result is that 95 million Wii's have been sold vs. 66 million Xbox 360's and 62 million PS3's.

The effect of the Wii introduction on Nintendo's console unit sales is shown below (pink line).

The graph above shows that the growth from Wii has stopped. In fact, the console has been in decline since early 2009. Fortunately for Nintendo, the company also developed a mobile strategy. Learning from its Game Boy device, its DS series of portable game consoles allowed the company to diversify its portfolio. The graph also shows the total portable units sold in blue.

However, this strategy has not been enough to protect the company from the disruptive effect of mobile computing. As the following chart shows, each new generation of portable from Nintendo has failed to break out of a general pattern of overall decline.

 

Contrast the DS product patterns with the iPod touch and iPad--multi-purpose products whose game functionality is "good enough" but whose communications and general-purpose app catalogs are re-defining the basis of competition yet again.

Nintendo bet on the 3DS to reboot the franchise. The 3DS product does show the characteristic initial spike in adoption but the level it launched at is far lower  than the level of the iPad. Nintendo has a big hill to climb to even recover the volumes it held in 2009. In contrast, the usurper Apple's volumes are doubling each year.

When products are compared as "ramps" in terms of growth post-launch the story becomes even clearer.

Although the iPhone and iPod touch ramped in similar ways[1] to the gaming platforms, iPad took an entirely different path. The 3DS benefited temporarily from a price cut but it seems to be returning to a well-worn trajectory.

The data points a bleak picture for Nintendo. The Wii was a success due to its competitiveness vs. non-consumption of gaming. But another low end disruption took hold in 2007. Good enough games on phones and mobile computers are taking consumption away from dedicated consoles, both fixed and mobile.

In addition, the rate at which game experiences are improving on iOS imply that they will overtake the "quality" of consoles in the not too distant future. Differences in distribution models also guarantee lower pricing for software for end users and enabling a far larger catalog of titles.[2]

This may sound like another story of fortune gained and fortune lost. The inevitable "what goes up must come down" aphorism. We become used to this pattern and assume it to be axiomatic. But there are causes for each success and causes for each failure.

The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption. Serial disruption is an uncomfortable state for an organization to exist in. As the story above shows, disruptions are usually enabled by "desperate" necessity. Desperation is not something management is trained to aspire for.

What management strives for is steady state satisfaction and predictability from intelligent planning.

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Notes:

1. Though the iPhone ramp matched the consoles, the growth for the iPhone is persisting at 100% y/y five years into the product. This means it is outstripping all console installed bases by at least a factor of 2.
2. The catalog is not only broad but deep in the sense that there are many new game concepts and experiments being tried. The app store is a vast testbed for game and entertainment ideas.

We discuss the five characteristics of disruption: Net growth and value creation, inevitability, increased speed of change, necessity for macroeconomic growth, historical consequences. This and much more will form the basis of discussion for Asymconf.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #29: The Consequences of Disruption.

The phenomenon we call business disruption could benefit from a different name. Although it signifies a disturbance or an interruption in an industry, it's much more than that.

The nominal definition I work with is that disruption is the "transfer of wealth in an industry from dominant incumbents to disadvantaged entrants." It's a convenient definition because it's brief, it puts the emphasis on economic value and because it alludes to a reversal of fortune and the implied extraordinariness.

However, there are several nuances lost and contradictions ignored in this definition. I want to enumerate them here and now:

1. Although in a disruption there is a transfer of wealth, that wealth is not necessarily conserved. An industry that undergoes a disruption often emerges larger, more productive or more influential. Disruption typically creates net growth.
2. Although extraordinary and spectacular it is also very commonplace. Disruption is not rare. In fact, it rarely fails to happen. One could even say that if it does fail to happen, it's a symptom of an industry in crisis.
3. Being so common, it can be seen as a regular occurrence. But if the regularity of disruption can be considered to have a clock cycle, its frequency is increasing.
4. Disruption in the literal sense implies discomfort, displacement and even destruction. But it's necessary to the health of any economy. The analogy to biology is that death is the most important thing in life.
5. Although only recently characterized and studied in cases set in the past century, the pattern is evident throughout history.

I've offered examples of these consequences or side-effects of disruption but I'll emphasize once more the example I'm most familiar with. To illustrate the primary definition, the AMP index is a measure of the success of one company relative to a set of peers in the mobile phone industry. It's the average of four market shares: mobile phone units, smartphone units, revenues and operating profits.

This chart shows the shift in AMP index values for the competitors whose data is public and which make up the vast majority of units sold:

The reversal of fortunes, though not complete, is clearly evident. Motorola and Sony-Ericsson, two of the brands that were a significant part of the mobile phone landscape for more than a decade, have ceased to exist as independent companies. A third, LG, is likely to follow. Nokia, the most successful phone vendor for the decade of the 2000's is in severe distress at this time, valued barely above book. RIM, a pioneer, is priced below book value and HTC, another pioneer is also looking for a way to remain relevant.

But we have to appreciate that as these valuations evaporated, the market grew both in value and in volume. The overall spending on phones has never been higher. The total profits captured is also growing. By any standard, smartphones are a booming business. Queues form for the latest versions, there are supply constraints and media coverage is almost universal.

We also have to appreciate that the Nokia that is faltering today was itself disruptive when it gained its prominence. In the 1990s the mobile phone market was dominated by Motorola, then by Ericsson. Nokia was a relative latecomer and succeeded by being better in some regards (e.g. the ease of use of text messaging on its phones) but also by being asymmetric. Using logistics and a portfolio approach to the market allowed it to build scale while maintaining margins. Process innovation led to component shortages for competitors and allowed Nokia to build massive distribution. It also allowed it to invest in software which gave it a unique selling point for several years.

Looking into the even more distant past, the mobile phone market has seen several waves of disruption. Going from analog to digital was such a turnover. The companies which were successful with analog (mainly Motorola which supplied not just handsets but infrastructure) were sidelined when global digital standards took root. Integrated European vendors dominated a period when 2G GSM was becoming predominant. Isolated pockets of integrated innovation like iMode in Japan also had mini-booms but were swamped by standardization and the Galapagos syndrome.

And let's not forget that mobile itself has been disruptive to fixed line telephony. Looking at all telecom, the transitions from fixed to mobile, analog to digital and most recently feature-based to computing-based platforms have all been disruptive, bringing a new set of companies to lead while incumbents fretted.

It should also be noted that these changes are happening more rapidly. The chart above has a five year period. The change from analog to digital took longer. Over 10 years since its inception analog was still dominant. If we look how long it took for mobile to take consumption away from fixed, that process is still ongoing, several decades later. The speed is so slow that some countries have skipped over fixed networks altogether.

With software-defined devices and cloud-based distributed computing the changes will become even more rapid. Even though the user base is expanding to cover nearly the entire global population, the replacement rate of devices means that change in the tools and services people use are limited by supply rather than demand. Supply-based innovation or "the new manufacturing" will probably be the dominance-defining asymmetry of the next decade.

The disruption of mobile phones that Apple has foisted on the world through iOS has caused it to reach a point where it dwarves the values of other companies, not just in the sectors it competes, but in all sectors. Some suggest that Apple is an anomaly and does not reflect the economy. To truly understand the state of the economy, they say, means to subtract Apple from it. But I feel this is exactly wrong. Apple is, through the iPhone and iOS ecosystems, defining this era. Just like Microsoft defined an era of increased productivity through the creation of the "knowledge worker", or like GM re-defined transportation and the notion of the brand in the 50's, or like IBM re-defined business process efficiency with automation in the 60's and 70's, these companies were not anomalies of their era. They were the eras. They were the locomotives of growth that taught other companies how to operate and the contemporary managers how to manage.

Companies that study Apple today will benefit by understanding how it re-wrote the rules. The anomaly is the norm. The exception is the rule. The times they are indeed a-changin'.

Finally, to put disruption in a historical perspective. I wrote a retrospective on the history of the telegraph as a parable of how disruption could be interpreted to have happened even a century ago. What I hope to do now is to show how, given this set of spectacles, we can see how the fate of nations was determined, in part at least, by the ability of leadership to accommodate disruption.

The case of growth or limits to that growth, the question of integration vs. modularity and the evolution of value chains all have application for regulators, policy makers and political leaders.

The dialogue on this topic will begin in Amsterdam on April 13th 2012, at Asymconf. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Notes:

1. This is the material accompanying the first case discussion at Asymconf. Participants are encouraged to read it before the show.

With this interview, we begin a journey into the world of entertainment and the forces that are re-shaping what most of the world hires daily for recreation. We will talk to actors, writers, producers, distributors, and media execs. We'll get perspective on what I expect will be a big year for television in 2012 and prepare for the new era to follow.

In this episode I talk to actor Hoon Lee[1] about the challenges of disruption in the creative arts, and theater in particular.

5by5 | The Critical Path #15: The Theater of Disruption.

1. Soon to be the voice of Master Splinter on the to-be-re-released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series. More about Hoon here: IMDb.
2. Read more here: Building identity - Hoon Lee: a black sheep because he was artistically inclined

Guessing the next Apple product has become the parlor game of choice for a whole generation of technology journalists and analysts. The premise of the game is that given a track record of breakthrough products, there is always another one just around the corner. Being the one to predict this next breakthrough product creates credibility and demonstrates the domain knowledge of the predictor. If the prediction fails to materialize there is consolation in dismissing the actual announced product as disappointing, unsophisticated or, worst of all, uninteresting.

Most often, these guesses are as much a reflection of the analyst as they are an analysis of the company. Too many predictions are designed to impress or demonstrate the imagination or knowledge of the predictor. They typically anticipate a giant leap of functionality, power or market re-structuring. They envision revolution not evolution; a cutting of the Gordian knot not a polishing of ugly rocks.

Yet nearly all of Apple's launches have been sustaining improvements in existing products, technologies or platforms. To name just a few:

• The iPad is an evolution of the iPod touch
• The iPod touch is an evolution of the iPhone
• The iPhone uses OS X and Objective C from the Mac
• OS X came from NeXT
• The app store market model came out of the iTunes store
• The iTunes store came from iTunes which came first to the Mac as a media sync tool for the iPod
• etc.

John Gruber explained the process last spring as it relates to many of Apple's launches. Although the iPhone did introduce a new user input method and experience that takes consumption in a new direction, its building blocks were there for all to see for many years. The iPhone is a natural evolution of the computer with a handy little "Phone" app.

Likewise, the iPod came seemingly out of nowhere but by watching the original launch you see it as part of a "media hub" strategy that envisions the Mac as a personal server. The very products which ended up disrupting the Mac/PC began as extensions of their victims.

You can trace the DNA of almost all of Apple's products to previous products. If Apple did not have these foundations, the slow-motion revolutions would not have happened. Rather than a deliberate big bang, Apple's disruptions are the result of a discovery process. A test, iterate and improve loop. This is why they seem obvious after the launch but also why they seem to be such an anti-climax.

Therefore, the challenge of predicting Apple's next product should be tackled not only through an act of imagination but by carefully projecting the current products and understanding where they can evolve.

So it is that I approach the question of Apple's TV disruption. My working assumption about the next Apple TV is that it already exists. It's none other than the existing Apple TV, improved.

Here are the clues or hints I noted:

• It uses iOS and the hardware from the devices that run it. It originally ran a PC architecture and shared a kernel with Macs.
• It has been integrated with iTunes media stores (with the notable exception of the iTunes app store)
• It has begun to introduce channels other than downloads (ESPN, Wall Street Journal) thus establishing its own distribution for traditional content
• It is a global product, depending only on the Internet protocols and independent of the balkanized cable standards
• Through AirPlay it is integrated with Macs and Apple devices.
• Through display mirroring, iOS devices can use the TV as an external monitor and can even change their own behavior when doing so

This last point is intriguing. I have not seen discussion of this feature, but if using an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S with iOS 5 and an Apple TV with the latest software updates it's possible to have an iOS device become a controller for TV-based game experiences. Developers are already using the API. When using a pinball game with screen mirroring, the device becomes a controller while the action takes place on the big screen. Switching display mirroring off bring the action and control back onto the small screen. There are still problems with lag and the processors are over-taxed on high frame rates, but the APIs are already there for developers. (I could also mention the potential of new a Bluetooth standard for better wireless response).

What these signals point to is Apple defining the TV as an iOS portfolio product. This means integration with iTunes, including an app store. This, in turn, means unleashing developer/creative talent through new monetization opportunities. This means new user experiences in discovery. This means FaceTime-like communication through the TV. This means many other things but mostly it means that the TV will be a platform product.

The only challenge is a (currently lacking) smooth interface. Perhaps that's where voice comes into the picture. But whether that is built-in at the next rev of the product or not is not the story. The story is going to be the sustaining improvement in the original Apple TV. A wonderfully asymmetric product begging to be ignored. A product that because of its apparent lack of success, effectively hides all its secrets in plain sight.

A few years ago, around the middle of the last decade, the mobile phone market was characterized by the rivalry between a few established vendors. These were Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. These incumbent companies had a broad portfolio of devices including smartphones and feature phones and basic phones. Many also sold networking equipment and were deeply engaged with their customers, network operators.

There was also a set of entrants who offered only smartphones.  They were quirky. HTC was a a prominent "ODM" or original design manufacturer who built phones for companies who added their brands and sold and supported the product. HTC made phones and PDAs for operator brands and for some large PC companies. It also began to sell phones under its own brand. RIM was also offering products that had evolved from pagers into email appliances with added voice capabilities. But RIM's products were not very good as phones. Voice was so poorly integrated that many people carried both a BlackBerry and a voice phone. Then there was Palm with something called a Treo which promised many things but did not quite deliver.

In 2007 something happened which changed the industry. It took a few years to even realize it was happening but by the time it was obvious, it had changed to such a degree that huge companies found themselves in financial distress. This chart illustrates the effect.

In a few short years the rivalry between incumbent handset makers has evolved into a rivalry between mobile platforms where the incumbents were caught in an increasingly unprofitable role of hardware integrators. Motorola is now being absorbed by a search company. Sony Ericsson is being absorbed into a consumer electronics company. Nokia is going through a potentially existential crisis and even abandoned its platform. Acquisition talk surrounds LG's phone efforts. Samsung is prosperous but sill at the mercy of its software suppliers. Even the entrants are starting to feel beleaguered. RIM, the oldest pure play smartphone company is trading below book value and has regressed in value to 2004 levels. Palm evaporated. A view into the changes is the rankings of the companies in terms of volumes, sales and profit as shown below.

How did large, powerful, smart companies let this happen?

It happened despite having a clear, front row view of the transition of the industry from mobile voice to mobile computing. The shift in the basis of competition from "connecting people" to "connecting people to data" ended up being a classic disruptive trap. Many will argue that it was the failing of individual managers. Perhaps, but how did they conspire to fail simultaneously?

When you see disruption happening, it's natural to seek out a cause, a pivotal magical "force" or event that enabled the weak to humble the strong--the proverbial sling that enabled David to defeat Goliath.

My hypothesis is that The Primary Cause for the shift of profits from Incumbents to Entrants has been the disruptive impact of a new input method. I illustrated this with the help of the January 2007 slide presented by Steve Jobs at the launch of iPhone.

Each new input method led to not just a disruption but new platforms and new business models. Each new "sling" victimized a set of historic companies. Mainframe and minicomputers, consumer electronics giants and now telecoms.

Just like David's sling, these technologies are not powerful in and of themselves, but rather, the way they are used makes them unpredictably sinister. The context of using capacitive touch on a handheld device rather than on a table-top makes it disruptive. Coupling it with high-speed mobile networks and powerful but efficient microprocessors made it into a force.

That is now ancient history. The consequences and repercussions are still being felt and weighed, but the smart money should be focusing on the next shift. From the time frame in the diagram above, it's clear that the cycle time between "Revolutionary User Interfaces" is shrinking. It's been five years since multi-touch. Is the next "RUI" already here? Is Siri the next RUI?

There are many things going for it:

1. It's not good enough
2. There are many smart people who are disappointed by it
3. Competitors are dismissive
4. It does not need a traditional, expensive smartphone to run but it uses a combination of local and cloud computing to solve the user's problem.
5. It is, in a word, asymmetric.

My disruptive hypothesis for Siri is that it shifts the competition from platforms positioned on a device to a "coupled" super-platform dependent on broadband and infrastructural computing.

Just after collecting enough data and observing patterns in it that give us clarity, It looks like things are about to change all over again.

 

At the Open Source Business Conference in March 2004 Clayton Christensen gave a presentation. It's available as an audio file for download here: Clayton Christensen | Capturing the Upside. I strongly recommend listening to the whole thing because it's the quintessential Disruption lecture.

It has relevance in many areas of analysis, but when I was trying to think of a way to characterize the potential for Siri I recalled one particular passage that I saw as almost clairvoyant. Seven and a half years ago, Clay said:

... the next time you go to a computer superstore, go to the voice recognition software shelf and pick up a box there that’s called the IBM ViaVoice.  Now don’t buy it, but just look at it!  They have a picture of the customer on the box, and it’s an administrative assistant who is sitting in front of her computer wearing a headset speaking rather than word processing.

You think about the value proposition that IBM has to be making to this woman.  She types 90 words a minute.  She is 99% accurate.  If she needs to capitalize something, she just instinctively presses shift and cruises through.  And IBM has to say, “No, don’t do that anymore.  I want you to put this headset on and teach yourself to speak in a slow and distinct and consistent manner in complete sentences.  If you must capitalize, you must pause, speak the command “capitalize,” pause, speak the word you want to capitalize, pause, speak the command “uncapitalize,” pause, please be patient, we are 70% accurate, this will get better we promise.”

This is not an attractive proposition to this customer.  And IBM has -- I’ve not worked with them at all, but as I understand it -- they’ve spent maybe $700 million trying to make voice recognition technology good enough that it can be used in that market.  This is a very difficult technical hurdle to surmount. Meanwhile, while they are investing that aggressively, Lego comes up with these robots that recognize “stop,” “go,” “left,” “right,” and the kids are thrilled with the four word vocabulary, and then "press -- or -- say -- one" kinds of applications take root, and now directory assistants ask you to say the city and state and so on, and much simpler, and an interesting market is emerging.

I bet maybe the next place it takes route is in chatrooms because the kids don’t spellcheck or capitalize anyway, and they would rather speak than type.  And maybe then the next application would be, when you see these stubby fingered executives with their BlackBerrys trying to peck out emails, and their fingers are four times the diameter of the keys, they’re only 70% accurate.  If somebody gave them a voice recognition algorithm that really didn't have to be very good so that they could speak their wireless email rather than peck it out, I bet they’d be thrilled with the crummy product.  And ultimately, as it takes route in these new applications, it may get good enough that we can do word processing with it, but it’ll be a long time.

The thing that strikes me about Siri is how "crummy" it is. It's trying to be an intelligent assistant but it's not nearly good enough. Many have called it "toy like". It was so uninteresting that there was minimal coverage of it after the keynote launch. One can almost forgive the cynics. It was "yet another feature".

However, it does seem to be good in a very limited set of tasks. It is something you can hire for some minor jobs that you'd rather not do. Basic calendar booking, context aware search and a few delightful surprises. But it's not trying to be much more. It's not trying to be a typist. It's not trying to be a companion. It's not trying to be smarter than you and make you redundant. It's only trying to help lubricate your life. This is what makes it so exciting.

Like the example of the toy robot that delights the child, Siri delights with simple competence. It's not profound but as Clay points out in his talk, it's a necessary first step. What must follow are many more steps. Siri must get better. And because it will have at least 200 million users, I'm betting it will. So over time it will take on more tasks and will eventually help us in ways that we cannot yet conceive possible today. This is just like the introduction of the capacitive touch screen. Popularizing the touch screen has led to experiences with phones and tablets which we did not think possible four years ago.

But it takes time. Like any truly useful breakthrough, it takes a long time to mature. And also like any disruption, the potential of Siri is rooted in four principles:

1. Humble early goals which it accomplishes well
2. A large population of enthusiastic adopters who give it sustenance
3. Plenty of headroom in improvement giving it areas to grow into with positive feedback
4. A patient sponsor who makes a stable living

There's no magic to it. In fact it's banal. These are only the principles that every parent uses to raise a child.

 

In an Harvard Business Review post Rob Wheeler makes the case for the Kindle Fire as a disruptive innovation. I believe that it is but crucially I disagree that the Kindle Fire is a low end disruption.

My assessment of the Kindle Fire is based on the two attributes which Amazon highlights as the key selling points which offer a basis of differentiation and potential for asymmetric competition: a low price and a new browsing model. I believe that these two attributes result in two opportunities: one for low end disruption and another of new market disruption. I reject the first and tentatively support the second.[1]

The price

It's immediately obvious that the price point of the Kindle Fire is well below alternatives. That forms the basis of disruptive potential, but before we jump to analyzing the disruption hypothesis we should determine whether and to what extent Amazon profits from the device directly. Profitability gives us a clue to where Amazon will apply resources and thus establish its trajectory of improvement.

We know the margin on the Fire is low because we can calculate the bill of materials for 7" tablets. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray estimates that Amazon "loses" $50 for each unit sold. We also know that the design Amazon used is essentially very similar to the RIM PlayBook and was sourced from the same ODM. RIM priced the product at $499 but has struggled to find buyers and is reluctantly dropping the price. We also can estimate that Apple with a product having more than twice the screen size is keeping modest (~30%) gross margins for at a price point approximately double that of the Fire. It does seem that Amazon does not have much or any margin to dip into.[2]

So the Fire can be classified as a low price product. Does that make it a low end disruption?

Disruption requires asymmetry but it also requires the ability to go up a trajectory of improvement along the basis of performance that a majority of users demand. The first condition is met, but what of the second? In a combined system where one asset is used to leverage another--the subsidized being sacrificed to benefit the profitable--success is conditional on one element being "good enough" while the other "needing improvement". Investment follows accordingly.

But investment decisions have consequences. The subsidized device is starved of investment while the profitable service is nurtured. We see evidence of short cuts in investment in the off-the-shelf nature of Kindle products: from a second-hand (unsanctioned) OS to a second-hand (ex-RIM) hardware. Meanwhile, Amazon spends heavily on capex for the infrastructure that delivers the profitable content.

If the hardware is indeed commoditized and cannot be usefully improved, then this model works. If, on the other hand, the hardware and systems software can benefit from dramatic improvements in technology then the model fails. The very asymmetry of a service vs. a product turns into the latter having all the advantages and the former failing to gain traction.

I'll give three examples of this how service model creates limitations which lead to a failure to disrupt a product model.

The Game Consoles

The first is the game console business. In consoles, the vendors maintain long hardware product life-cycles to recover their hardware investment and subsidy by maximizing the number of games attached to each console. If you plot product cycles you realize that the bigger the subsidy, the longer the hardware lifecycle. The result is a very wide turning circle which prevents innovation in new dimensions.

Consider that the Playstation or the Xbox could have been a low end computing disruption. The original Xbox was in fact a PC. It was supposed to bring PC dynamism to the console business and create a cottage industry of new developers building games on commoditized hardware. However by the second generation the Xbox was a locked down, custom architecture, pure gaming machine. Gone was Intel, gone was the PC architecture and gone was any dream of cheap development.

This is entirely due to the economics of subsidized hardware. It compelled Microsoft, the world's greatest software company, built on the open and cheap PC architecture to make closed, expensive hardware. Sony followed in kind as did Nintendo. Each generation of consoles was a sustaining improvement on gaming and had no ambition beyond gaming[3]. The subsidy and the dependence on an integrated content value network led to a distinct lack of disruption and an insular industry which continues to seek out increasingly immersive experiences for increasingly demanding customers while itself being disrupted by casual, mobile gaming.

The Set-top boxes

The second example is the TV set-top box business. There again, the vendors maintain long hardware cycles in order to recover subsides. There too, the main value driver is the content and its distribution which stipulates the architecture, and through subsidy, defines its evolution. This offers the vendor no motivation to improve the user experience[4], secondary uses or the absorption of new streams of content (like those the internet can offer.)

Again, the set-top box could have been a budding disruptive opportunity for Microsoft. They invested billions in the 1990s to acquire placement of software on set-top boxes in an attempt to penetrate the living room. And again Microsoft was not alone. Since then Tivo, Google and Apple and many others tried to attach cheap hardware to video streams. They all failed to get on a disruptive trajectory. And again, the blame can be placed on the stifling effect of subsidies and dependencies on services or content which dictate where the value and hence the investments should go.

The Blackberry

The third example is the RIM Blackberry. Although RIM made most of its money on hardware and was by no means subsidizing it, the differentiation of their product was undoubtedly its service value. Both as a corporate device with BES and as a consumer device with BBS, customers "hired" the product as a service. By being committed to this model RIM management became blind to the hardware and client OS software innovations coming down the pike.

Through their own admission, they could not accept a touch screen because it would make the messaging experience too slow and it is messaging that sells Blackberries. They could not accept apps (and hence platform orchestration) as a differentiation because their customers did not hire Blackberries for "lifestyle apps". Merely being differentiated as a service leads to blindness and enough hesitation that you run off the disruptive rails.

People ascribe myopia or incredible absence of mind to RIM's management but the opposite is true. They were deeply committed and observant of the things which made the Blackberry successful. It just happened to be something that stopped being relevant.

The iPhone

I'll add one more "bonus" example on this. The iPhone is also a subsidized product and it seems very successful. How come it won? The answer is in details. As I mentioned, the other products ended up in poor life cycles or incorrect motivations. The iPhone differs in that the lifecycle of the product is much shorter (2 years ownership with 1 year for product updates). The shorter lifecycle works for the iPhone because it has a very high service revenue base to dip into to offset the subsidy. Something none of the content models above could count on.

Consider that each game console subsidy needs to paid off by a handful of game titles whose royalties to the console maker are modest. Or that the TV box needs to ride on top a service that also has thin margins from a stable or slightly shrinking user base. In contrast, the iPhone enables vast new consumption worth thousands of dollars to the operator. This is the famous ARPU uplift that smart phones enable. Users are doubling their telecom spending when they move to smartphones.

The margins for Kindle content are thin. Very thin. Apple runs its content business at break even though it transacts billions of items per month. The amount of content that needs to pass through the Kindle ecosystem (with lower prices than Apple charges) will need to be astronomical to make it profitable on the shortened cycle time the iPhone enjoys. Thus the Kindle is likely to languish in a leisurely update cycle with users encouraged to hang on to their devices for years. This is the case at least with the original e-Ink Kindles. How eagerly awaited are new generations? How many users stampede to update the hardware or even upgrade the software? How many users have owned every version of the Kindle?

Service Scale

Finally one last point about services. As Amazon asserts, they see Kindle as a service, which, I concede, is asymmetric to a product business. The problem is that services don't scale as well as products. Consider that none of the content streams that Amazon will depend on are available outside the US. The Kindle has not been a strong seller internationally. This is because book rights are limited to national boundaries as are movie rights and song rights. Apple has only this week finally completed the rollout of iTunes music to all of Europe! A process that took almost a decade. And they are still unable to sell music in most of Asia and forget about movies or TV shows.[5]

The reality is that there are no global service brands. Not in telecommunications (operators are, at best, regional), not in Media (TV, radio, publishing are a local businesses), not in Banking (not even in commercial banking) and not in Retail (even Wal-Mart was humbled trying to export its disruption). The internet has not broken down any of these boundaries and even Amazon has modest reach outside the US for any of their franchises. Services are local but products can be global.[6]

To wrap up, this discussion on the asymmetry of device-based services to product models leads me to conclude that the Fire will not have the opportunity to disrupt the iPad or tablets in general. Amazon sees the hardware and software of a device as a commodity and the content and its distribution as valuable. This assumes that the device is "good enough" and will not require deep re-architecting or that new input methods can be easily absorbed. In short, they see the tablet as at the end of its evolutionary path. Apple sees the exact opposite. The iPad is 18 months old, and as they say in the ads, they see it as only the beginning.

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Notes:

1. Due to length of discussion, in this post I will make the case against the low end disruptive potential and use a second post to make the case for it being a new market disruption.
2. Presumably, Amazon will also distribute only through Amazon.com and thus not incur channel mark-ups. This means that comparisons with other tablets should be at a price nearer to 70% of retail.
3. Gaming networks and video streaming are extensions but neither leveraged open architectures.
4. See also discussion from June 2010 on the challenges to Apple TV that Steve Jobs enumerated.
5. Apps are another story. Because it controls the medium, Apple can and does sell apps in every country where the iPhone or iPad or iPod touch is available.
6. Note also that because of distribution through Amazon.com, the Kindle cannot reach as many buyers as a tablet selling through the tens of thousands of points of purchase that operators and retail shops offer.

 

The question of low end disruption should be a concern to any manager. It's one of the most important sources of growth and has led to a vast amount of wealth creation.

Apple was an early low end disruptor by selling personal computers at a fraction of mini-computer prices. Toyota also offered "cheap" cars as an entrant in the market. Pixar made blockbusters for a lot less than live action studios. Google offers good enough office software without a license. Finally Microsoft built its whole business on low-end business software at knock-down prices.[1]

All these entrants made fortunes often at the expense of entrenched incumbents. Disruption grows the pie but also transfers a lot of value away from existing competitors.

So it should not be surprising that new products like the iPad should be scrutinized for their vulnerability to low end disruption. Brian Caufield asks the question if Apple has any future with the iPad given the potential for $99 tablets.

The question is indeed why not introduce an ultra-cheap tablet, for example from Amazon, which makes up for the low price with an innovative business model like selling content or user behavior data. After all, game consoles are sold this way. This is the classic razor/razor-blade business model.

The answer to why not is actually not simply that the economics don't work. They might work some day even if they really don't today.

The answer to why not is that the iPad is not good enough.

Disruption (low-end or otherwise) happens when a product over-shoots the market. It makes sense to compete on a new basis, be it low price or convenience or customization, if the prevailing basis of competition has led the prevailing products to be more than good enough. If you look through all the examples of low-end disruption, you'll find that the incumbents were motivated to flee up-market and to continue to improve their products even though they exceeded the demands and expectations of mainstream buyers.

For the iPad to be vulnerable, it has to be way better than the mainstream users' needs. Which asks the question of what needs are being served. If it's book reading, it probably is more than good enough. But if it's replacing a laptop computer, certainly not. Being too feeble is the most common complaint about the iPad. Being a bloated over-functioned and overly complex solution looking for a problem is definitely not on buyer's list of concerns.

So on this basis, the iPad and other tablets pass vulnerability tests with flying colors. The product is woefully inadequate for mainstream computing.

The consequence is that people will yearn and beg for more functionality and will drop the last generation for the next without hesitation. This pattern of breathless upgrades is symptomatic of a product racing up a trajectory of improvements which are relevant to buyers.

So until buyers find the n+1 version of the iPad to be superfluous and over-specced, having too much battery life, too big a screen, too much storage and with more speed and bandwidth than needed, the iPad need not fear the low end.

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Notes:

1. Other classic low-end disruptors are: Wal-Mart, GE Capital, Toys 'r Us, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hyundai, MySQL, Amazon, Visa, Embraer, E-trade, Macy's, Japan Steel, Circuit City, Home Depot, Yahoo Travel.