Why the iPhone confounds disruption theorists

Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson and BlackBerry were all victims of disruption. During the 1990s and 2000s, they led the cell phone during its period of take-off into ubiquity. Then in the last five years, they have lost their leadership and are on the verge of irrelevance. The common culprit was the 2007 launch of Apple’s iPhone. However, the iPhone has long confounded proponents of disruption theory. Why? Because they have had a one-sided view of disruption; enough to make them blind to their true nature.

The main proponent of disruption theory is Clay Christensen who invented the term. His theory is that disruption (that is, the failure of otherwise successful companies) comes when those companies miss important innovations precisely because they are unappealing to their primary customer base. That provides an opportunity for new entrants to leap onto those technologies, ride them through improvements until they actually end up competing head-to-head for the customers of established firms. With regard to the iPhone, Clay Christensen made an initial assessment that he later admitted was incorrect. He admitted that a few years later saying that his mistake was to consider the iPhone as disruptive to phone makers when, in fact, it was disruptive to laptops.