Pythoneer

I was just listening to Clayton Christensen’s, the inventor of the term disruptive technology, speech “Capturing the upside” from the OSBC 2004. When he uses the example of open source tools, which sometimes have less features and might be harder to use and claims this as a disruptive technology my brain started to draw the line to EQing.

But lets go slowly here. What are those two things?

A disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill [...] or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements [...].

And EQing is a technology introduced by Kathy Sierra.

An audio equalizer was a natural metaphor for us, and [...] we use the concept of EQing to brainstorm new designs.

Christensen states that open source is a great example for disruptive technology, because it (sometimes) brings products to the market that are crummier. The disruption is not a breakthrough improvement but a redefinition of improvement.

It performed so poorly that it couldn’t be used by customers in the main stream. But it brought to the market a simpler and more affordable product that allowed a whole new population of people to begin owning and using it.

This quote is just something that EQing is projecting very nicely as moving sliders. You just (create and) move the sliders “number of features” and “usability” way down, which results in moving the sliders “price” down (or simply remove it :-)) and “availablity” further up (there might be better names for the sliders). May be I don’t hit the nail exactly on the head. But I hope you know what I mean. Disruptive technologies might come around by just tweaking a set of parameters of existing technologies/products. Somehow the EQing technique is very nice to picture what happens. I might start using it a bit more intensively.
Not to forget that Christensen says later this product at some point also intersects with the main stream.

Please note that I did not try to explain the theories in detail neither I enlightened you on all parts of it. I only pulled out those parts that I think had an interconnection for me at this point in time. The entire theories are much more exhaustive than stated here.