Talk:Disruptive innovation/Archives/2014

Storage section is overpopulated by floppy drive technologies

Firstly, perhaps there is no need to list all the floppy iterations. This is redundant, and a whole lot of industries had an evolution chain where specific technologies superceded each other. In this case the improvement was mostly incremental and, in cases such as 3.5" vs 5.25", coexisted for years.

Another thing is that Bernoully/Zip/Jazz thing shouldn't be on the list: it wasn't even remotely as popular as floppies which it allegely disrupted, couldn't compete with them economically in lower-budget segments, and had fallen way behind very quickly once affordable CD-writers entered the market. This is incredibly similar to Sony's MiniDisc which was intended as a high-quality, high-performance replacement for audio cassette recording but failed to really disrupt anything: cassettes were cheap, easy to work with, and they played everywhere—and then CDs came and solved the dispute. There are other examples for this this kind of "failed disruptions", too. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.238.97.38 (talk) 10:44, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree about the the Bernoulli/Zip/Jazz. Disagree about the other drives, however -- these are Christensen's main example. It's normal for disruptive innovations to coexist with the product they will eventually replace. Two different companies are selling different products to different markets for some time, and then the disruption occurs when the low end market unexpectedly starts taking bites out of the high end market. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:09, 26 September 2014 (UTC)