BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
08 Feb 2009

This is very accurate from my experiences and how traditional media companies look at what we do, and how it’s changing quickly.  From SAI:

Clay Christensen said time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business.

The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled — I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.

We see this all the time: publishing and distributing videos on the Web is small potatoes to billion dollar media companies, but the longer they go without doing it, the more they will suffer.  But the sooner they embrace digital distribution, the sooner they will kill themselves by destroying their traditional revenue streams.  This phenomenon isn’t a mere case of the Innovator’s Dilemma, it is a double jeopardy that is akin to the doomed if you, doomed if you don’t mantra.