Business & Deployment
Disruption
After Christensen: new technology starts at the bottom — worse, but cheaper and more accessible — and grows until incumbents lose their business model. AI fits the pattern disturbingly well: the model’s first draft is worse than a professional’s, but a thousand times cheaper. Anyone who compares only today’s quality underestimates the curve it is moving along.
An example
Photography is the standard example and is mostly told wrongly. Kodak did not go under because the digital camera was invented — it had invented it itself. It went under because its own business hung on film and nobody inside had an interest in replacing it. The technology was there twenty years earlier. What was missing was the willingness to give up the lucrative part.
A closer look
The term comes from Clayton Christensen and means something specific: an initially worse, cheaper offering serves an underserved fringe and grows upward from there. Displacement by a simply better product is something else.
Why it matters
The term is so worn that in presentations it now mostly serves to create urgency. What remains useful is the original observation: displacement regularly begins at the low end, with an offering that is worse but cheaper and simpler — and is therefore rightly ignored by incumbents, because their best customers do not want it. The workable question is therefore not “What will disrupt us?” but: which customer segment do we deliberately not serve today because it is not worth it?
Commonly misunderstood
Because the word is used for every change, it loses its diagnostic power. The interesting question remains who is making the cheaper, initially worse offering.