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Being “good enough”
At this year’s BookExpo, I moderated a three-publisher panel whose participants discussed the current state of travel publishing. The most memorable moment (for me, at any rate) came when one of the publishers looked across the table and said,
“If we were competing against just ourselves, we’d have this all figured out. But we’re not. We’re competing against TripIt, and Travelocity, and even frequent-traveler programs that offer ‘good enough’ content at the point of purchase.”
Late last week, I came across a paidcontent article, “Create your own disruption to avoid media meltdown”, that I should have loved. Disruption, media, a color chart: fodder for the Magellan sweet spot.
You may have guessed already: I didn’t love it.
The piece, written by the author of the Forrester report it summarizes, gets some things right. Audiences – customers – are most decidedly in control now. And there are services (my examples include Monster.com, Craigslist, TripIt) that have disrupted the traditional media model.
Unfortunately, the analysis gets two important things entirely wrong. Forrester cites the Internet, broadband, smartphones and the iPad as examples of “new technology [enabling] customers to make choices’ about how they interact with products.” I’d argue that these are examples of sustaining (not disruptive) technologies.
These technologies make the existing product offering incrementally better. Broadband supports faster file transfers, but it’s Netflix, not Comcast, Verizon or AT&T, that disrupted Blockbuster. The iPad is a solid rich-media device, but it is being used to extend reading, not eliminate it. Getting content ready for the new platforms may challenge publishers, but on their own the devices don’t change publishing.
In describing disruption as the point at which “[c]ustomers re-evaluate traditional products and expect more than they currently get”, Forrester makes a larger and more concerning mistake. As defined by Clay Christensen, disruption starts when customers accept less than what they currently get, because the original products were over-engineered or did not meet a latent requirement.
Think of things like desktop publishing (lament the typography), open-source software, GoogleDocs (hardly Microsoft Word) and Craigslist (no display ads; just text), again. These tools can disrupt existing businesses precisely because they focus on a component of the established value proposition. They’re not a direct assault, and they are not just technology. They are customer-focused solutions.
I think Forrester gets the lessons right (particularly “become your own disruption”), but in calling sustaining technologies “disruptive”, it increases the likelihood that we’ll miss the real threat: product and service offerings that are “good enough” at the moment we need them. As travel publishers and others have found, these threats often look less complete than the current offerings.
Posted by S. Gaigher
Interesting point of view, but this issue is in danger of becoming a pedantic argument that boils down to differing definitions of disruptive technology. Christensen never offered a clear-cut definition of disruptive technology. He described the process of technology disruption, where technology that initially serves only a niche market, eventually displaces the current technology in the mainstream market. Unfortunately, this means that ‘new’, or rather, ‘improved’ technology (e-books, digital publishing) cannot be called disruptive technology until it has usurped the ‘current’ mainstream technology (print publishing). Until that happens, it’s a matter of speculation. Useful speculation, nevertheless. Another definition of disruptive technology states that it ‘changes the bases of competition by changing the performance metrics along which firms compete’ (Danneels, E. 2004). In that sense, disruptive technology theory is very relevant to the publishing industry, and worth considering in developing new publishing business models.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Thanks for your comment. Happily, I’m not that keen on pedantic arguments, either 
I have no problem using a broader definition for ‘disruption” and applying it within publishing. My concern with the Forrester analysis, outlined above, is that the technologies they chose are not disruptive, and that their focus on developing “better” applications pushes publishers toward feature-rich solutions.
My October 21 post, “Context first”, talks at (great) length about the damage done by the container model of publishing: bundled content defined (and limited) by the containers we use to present that content. Unbundled versions of that content are not better, much as Craislist is visually unappealing to the end user.
Content is increasingly unbundled, especially in sectors like travel. I don’t need a guide to France if I am going only to Paris; I don’t need to know every good restaurant in Paris if I am staying for three days. I need to know just enough to make a decision. Ideally, that information is available in an environment that lets me act on my decision when I make it.
To me, that’s the disruptive technology: a solution built around my needs (in that spirit, I fully accept Daneels’ definition). I love travel guides, their color pictures, their extensive histories. But if I want to book a hotel, I just need to have enough information to choose one. In choosing a restaurant, the disruptive technology is more likely to be GPS than the iPad.