Unfortunately, legislating anti-competitive moats is something incumbents often do because they have the resources and political clout to do so (something small companies rarely have) and because it is, once large-company ossification sets in, easier than innovating. It is a rare company that will continue to innovate, even at the expense of its own current business, rather than deploying lawyers and lobbyists to string up razor wire around their market positions. Of course, Maginot Lines are no more successful in business than they were in keeping the Germans out of Paris; it just tends to take a lot longer for the forces of change to bypass market impediments than it took the French to fold.
The lovely thing about truly disruptive technologies is that, at least initially, they are seen as not-very-good solutions to second-tier problems (here's Wikipedia on Chistensen's definition of a disruptive technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology). This feature (not a bug!) can give good ideas the time to get a few steps out of the cradle before incumbent industries, their lawyers, and the political powers-that-be in their employ try to strangle them. It isn't much, but sometimes a little bit of a head start is all you can hope for.
The path from interesting research to safe, efficacious therapy is a long funnel with a verrrrrry narrow outlet. Many things that look interesting in vitro don't work in animal models (rats, dogs, etc.), much less people -- there's a lot more going on in a living body than in a petri dish, so even compounds that show promise early on can disappoint later. I was a venture investor in biotechnology companies for nearly nine years; one of our most promising portfolio companies had a drug candidate blow up in Phase III clinical trials (pretty damn close to the end of the funnel) because, despite all of the promising results in earlier stages of development, the drug simply didn't work in a statistically meaningful way in double-blind clinical trials. The FDA process can slow things down, to be sure, but the fundamental problem is that the biology of living creatures is extraordinarly complex and only imperfectly understood. No conspiracies needed -- this stuff is just very, very hard.
more like shipping horsepower; it's a way of coming up with a single metric that normalizes the range of machines/configurations the company sells -- kind of like a capitalization-weighted stock index; the big boxes count for more, which they wouldn't if you just went by units shipped.
The concept of hyperlinking originates with Vannevar Bush in the mid-40's, if not before. For an idea to be patentable, it must be both novel and non-obvious -- hard tests to pass for a concept that has been floating around in the open literature for more than 3 decades.
Spot on. M$FT is desperate to better penetrate the enterprise at a level that will provide higher margins than those earned by low-end servers, desktop software and low-end tools. They will leverage their developer base (VB is the most widely-used language in the enterprise by a large margin, if IDC is to be believed) to go after mission-critical apps that are currently running on non-M$FT servers and will do so by making things as easy as possible for their millions of developers. The real essence of Christiansen's disruptive technology argument is that the low end always wins, by creeping relentlessly upward. M$FT is really really good at relentless creeping.
Slashdot Mirror
um, he married the product manager
Unfortunately, legislating anti-competitive moats is something incumbents often do because they have the resources and political clout to do so (something small companies rarely have) and because it is, once large-company ossification sets in, easier than innovating. It is a rare company that will continue to innovate, even at the expense of its own current business, rather than deploying lawyers and lobbyists to string up razor wire around their market positions. Of course, Maginot Lines are no more successful in business than they were in keeping the Germans out of Paris; it just tends to take a lot longer for the forces of change to bypass market impediments than it took the French to fold.
It's a space station!
The lovely thing about truly disruptive technologies is that, at least initially, they are seen as not-very-good solutions to second-tier problems (here's Wikipedia on Chistensen's definition of a disruptive technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology ). This feature (not a bug!) can give good ideas the time to get a few steps out of the cradle before incumbent industries, their lawyers, and the political powers-that-be in their employ try to strangle them. It isn't much, but sometimes a little bit of a head start is all you can hope for.
The path from interesting research to safe, efficacious therapy is a long funnel with a verrrrrry narrow outlet. Many things that look interesting in vitro don't work in animal models (rats, dogs, etc.), much less people -- there's a lot more going on in a living body than in a petri dish, so even compounds that show promise early on can disappoint later. I was a venture investor in biotechnology companies for nearly nine years; one of our most promising portfolio companies had a drug candidate blow up in Phase III clinical trials (pretty damn close to the end of the funnel) because, despite all of the promising results in earlier stages of development, the drug simply didn't work in a statistically meaningful way in double-blind clinical trials. The FDA process can slow things down, to be sure, but the fundamental problem is that the biology of living creatures is extraordinarly complex and only imperfectly understood. No conspiracies needed -- this stuff is just very, very hard.
Wasn't Darl the name of the insane barn-burner in Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*? Coincidence? I think not.
more like shipping horsepower; it's a way of coming up with a single metric that normalizes the range of machines/configurations the company sells -- kind of like a capitalization-weighted stock index; the big boxes count for more, which they wouldn't if you just went by units shipped.
The concept of hyperlinking originates with Vannevar Bush in the mid-40's, if not before. For an idea to be patentable, it must be both novel and non-obvious -- hard tests to pass for a concept that has been floating around in the open literature for more than 3 decades.
Spot on. M$FT is desperate to better penetrate the enterprise at a level that will provide higher margins than those earned by low-end servers, desktop software and low-end tools. They will leverage their developer base (VB is the most widely-used language in the enterprise by a large margin, if IDC is to be believed) to go after mission-critical apps that are currently running on non-M$FT servers and will do so by making things as easy as possible for their millions of developers. The real essence of Christiansen's disruptive technology argument is that the low end always wins, by creeping relentlessly upward. M$FT is really really good at relentless creeping.