Looking for Disruption
-
22.12.04 at 1837 | # |
Let me weave several themes together…but first some background fabrics:
Definition
The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new, lower performance, but less expensive product. The disruptive technology starts by gaining a foothold in the low-end (and less demanding part) of the market, successively moving up-market through performance improvements, and finally displacing the incumbent’s product.
By contrast, a sustaining technology provides improved performance and according to Christensen will almost always be incorporated into the incumbent’s product.
Theory
In certain markets, the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can learn and adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments.
At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent, but exceeds the requirements of certain segments thereby gaining a foothold in the market. Christensen distinguishes between low-end disruption which targets customers that have been overshot and new-market disruption which targets customers that could previously not be served profitably by the incumbent.
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a family of XML-based communication standards with the following members:
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) (RDF: Resource Description Framework)
Functionally, RSS (pronounced “arr-ess-ess”) is a web syndication protocol primarily used by news websites and weblogs. A program known as an RSS aggregator or feed reader can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. RSS saves users from having to repeatedly visit favorite websites to check for new content or be notified of updates via email. …
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen which was debuted at CodeCon 2002. It is written in Python and is released under the MIT License.
Most notably, BitTorrent allows many people to download the same file without slowing down everyone else’s download. It does this by having downloaders swap portions of a file with one another, instead of all downloading from a single server. This way, each new downloader not only uses up bandwidth but also contributes bandwidth back to the swarm. Such contributions are encouraged because every client trying to upload to other clients gets the fastest downloads. …
Broadcatching refers to the use of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as an alternative to distributing multimedia content on the Internet. It is a play on words, in contrast to broadcasting. …
The term podcasting plays upon the terms broadcasting and webcasting and is derived from the name of the iPod portable music player, the playback device of choice of many early podcast listeners. podcasting is not directly associated with Apple’s iPod device or iTunes jukebox software. Podcasting is similar to time-shifted video software and devices like TiVo, which let you watch what you want when you want by recording and storing video, except that podcasting is used for audio and is currently free of charge. Note, however, that this technology can be used to pull any kind of file, including software updates, pictures, and videos.
The iPod is a portable MP3 player designed and marketed by Apple Computer. It stores audio on a built-in hard drive, which gives it a much larger capacity than portable audio players that rely on flash memory. It can also serve as an external hard disk while connected to a computer; a user can store any kind of file on it.
iTunes is a computer program made by Apple Computer intended to play, organize and buy music files.
Users are able to organize their music into playlists, edit file information, record compact discs, copy files to a digital music player, purchase music on the Internet through its built-in music store, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music as well as encode music into a number of different audio formats.
iTunes stores metadata about the audio files in two files. The first is a binary file called iTunes 4 Music Library that uses its own music library format, independent of the audio format’s tag capabilities (for example the ID3 tag). The second file, called iTunes Music Library.xml, uses XML format, allowing developers to easily write applications that can access the information (e.g. Apple’s own iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto or Freshly Squeezed Software’s Rock Star).
iMix is a feature in the music jukebok/online store, iTunes that allows users to publish playlists through the music store and share them with the public.
Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are handheld devices that were originally designed as personal organizers, but became much more versatile over the years. A basic PDA usually includes a clock, date book, address book, task list, memo pad and a simple calculator. One major advantage of using PDAs is their ability to synchronize data with desktop, notebook and desknote computers.
Here starts the weave:
I’ve been using computers since college in the ’70s—dabbled with Basic, APL, Fortran and others. Moved to the Mac in 1987 and then to several iterations of the Newton PDAs starting in 1993. And then onto Windows in 1998, followed by WinCE and PocketPC PDAs. In 2000, came the move to PalmOS PDAs—presently on the 4th iteration.
In April, I discovered the most powerful and potentially most versatile device I’ve every seen—the iPod. With the exception to the Macintosh and PalmOS PDAs most of computer-based technology is difficult at best to learn and be proficient at. If the auto industry produced products like software and hardware companies do—we would all still be riding horses and pulling buggies. The complexities and lack of reliability is staggering in the sense that we, as a society, have accepted as normative such mediocrity.
Originally, I had purchased the iPod to hold my law school lectures and (of course) music so I could do my lectures while driving to and fro from work. Now the 4th generation iPod has arrived—iPod Photo, and the true disruptive nature of this Apple product began to glimmer. Finally, a product from Apple that will not only be emulated (e.g., Mac) but dominate.
For quite sometime now I’ve been using the premier online textbook eMedicine—I don’t think I’ll ever purchase another major text in Emergency Medicine. Why? I have it available at home and in the ER—and never out-of-date. Addtionally, I use two wonderful products on my PDAs: PEPID and Epocrates. Both products are the type you learn to love and hate. The content and the ease of the PDA interface are excellent; however, the installations of both product is what is leading me to the belief that there must be a fundamentally disruptive technology coming for content delivery. Both are hostile to security software on the PC, coupled with the slow and frequently disrupted “auto-update” feature have caused me to disable the auto-updates. Contrast this with the complete ease of loading the iPod and accessing the iTunes store.
Almost all my medical journals are available in either HTML or PDF formats—so the physical journals have very short half-lives. My legal journals, well lets just say—they’re still crossing the digital divide.
The disruption I’m looking for is professional content (medical and legal for my context) that is able to be streamed in BitTorrent enclosures and podcasted to a professional quality iPod. There is no reason that the technology base installed for audio, image, and soon video podcasting cannot be adapted to free the content of PEPID, Epocrates, Emedicine, etc. from the PC and PDA-paradigms. We need to have medical information broadcatching. The harbingers are here and here. We should be able to create and distribute best practices, procedural sedation protocols, antibiotic sensitivities, CPTs, insurance formularies, etc. by the professional equivalent of an iMix created with an analogous iTunes via RSS…this is where the computer industry (and its lesser sibling, the PDA industry) needs to get disrupted by the “lower performance” content-rich information appliance industry—STAT. And make it wireless!
I’m looking for a disruption for Christmas…
Add New Comment
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.