Disruption Is Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

Too Long; Didn't Read

As consumers of technology, we tend to assign a defining moment to social and cultural changes, which, in post-event assessment, actually happened over the course of a long period of time. There always seems to be the “big bang” of disruption. It felt like Uber suddenly displaced taxis, mainframes became computers,or traditional phones became mobile and smart. We now talk about how the iPhone changed ‘everything’ when the truth is that the Palm Pilot and the Blackberry were around a good 10 years before the iPhone came onto the scene. Experts in the telephone industry were not worried because ‘those computer guys cannot build phones.’ Customer expectations slowly shifted as technology improved; first to the point of allowing customers to abandon computers for mobile devices, and now to where nearly everyone has a computer in their pocket, and only corporations buy desktops. It wasn’t a revolution. It was evolution. But a disastrous evolution for companies like Compaq.