To the Bitter End

2020.03.01 prev next

JOHN Gruber and Ben Thompson on “The Talk Show With John Gruber” (#276), discussing the late Clay Christensen:

JG: Basically— and I think he came around on this too, and I think in a very interesting way. And it just shows how intellectually— his intellectual approach was the right way, which was that he’s— to me, it’s a huge thing: are you willing to admit a mistake? It’s one of the biggest things in the world. And to me it’s— I mean, we could do a whole show about how the whole world’s goin’ to hell in a hand basket because nobody’s willing to reconsider their views on anything.

But like I’ve always said, the only way to be right all the time is to more-or-less try to be right all the time, be smart enough to be right most of the time, but be humble enough to recognize when you’re wrong, and then correct it. And if you can do that, then you can come really close to being right all the time. But you’ve gotta have that— that last part is important, because you’re gonna be wrong sometimes. I am. No doubt about it.

But I thought his analysis of the iPhone was interesting ... more-or-less that the thing that happened to the Mac with the Windows PCs, would happen again. I don’t think that’s an unfair summary. And I think even he acknowledged, later on, that his mistake was that the iPhone wasn’t disruptive to the cellphone industry; it was disruptive to the PC industry. ...

BT: That’s right. It’s a perfect example of disruption. And that’s what’s so ironic about it. You’re right: to his credit, he admitted this later. He was thinking about the iPhone as being a phone, which is understandable, because the name is iPhone. And the whole point is that it wasn’t a phone; it was a computer that happened to make phone calls. And once you realized it was a computer, it was— it’s the epitome of disruption.

Here’s what Christensen said just before iPhone launched:

[T]he prediction of [my disruption] theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

And here’s his later “admission” (in Businessweek) about how/why he got it wrong:

So the iPhone: There’s a piece of the puzzle that I did not understand. What I missed is that the smartphone was competing against the laptop disruptively. I framed it not as Apple is disrupting the laptop, but rather [the iPhone] is a sustaining innovation against Nokia. I just missed that. And it really helped me with the theory, because I had to figure out: Who are you disrupting?

All good, right? Well, no. Not good.

Just prior to iPhone, the four most popular smartphones were:

Palm — now dead
RIM (BlackBerry) — now a software/services company, a ghostly shell of its former self
Nokia — bought out by Microsoft; now effectively dead and gone
Motorola — bought out by Google, re-sold to Lenovo; effectively dead or irrelevant

Just prior to iOS, the popular smartphone OSes were:

BlackBerry — gone
PalmOS — turned into webOS; now gone
Windows ME — turned into Windows Phone; now gone
Symbian — gone

Today, the only popular non-Apple smartphones and smartphone OSes are those that most slavishly, brazenly copy everything about iPhone and iOS. And even those are “winning” by one metric only: unit share, which counts every piece-of-junk, $200 smartphone as one unit of share, equal to a top-of-the-line iPhone. And if that $200 phone has to be (or is) replaced every year or two? Then each replacement counts as yet another unit of “market share.”

Those are products that Apple doesn’t even care to compete with. Nor should it: by every other meaningful metric — revenue, profits, software ecosystem health, accessory market health, product reliability/longevity, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, business use, OS update percentages, malware situation, etc. — iPhone is handily winning, and has been for its entire life.

What about PCs? Just prior to iPhone, the four most popular PCs were:

HP — still going strong today
Dell — still going strong today
Lenovo — still going strong today
Acer — still going strong today

Just prior to iOS, the most popular PC OSes were:

Windows — still going strong today
Linux — still going strong today
Mac OS — still going strong today

Yes, iPhone is a little pocket computer — but pre-iPhone smartphones also were little pocket computers. They just really sucked compared to iPhone.

Clay Christensen was wrong about iPhone because his disruption theory is wrong. He never admitted that. The only thing he admitted is that he was wrong that iPhone wouldn’t succeed (like we didn’t already know) — but even that “admission” was wrapped in a twisted re-analysis that still supports his theory. Except that it actually doesn’t. At all.

Christensen, like virtually everyone who has ever lived, stuck to his theory to the bitter end. But don’t worry; the world’s not going to hell in a hand basket. Max Planck probably put it best:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

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