I truly hope that this is not a surprise for anyone. I sold my Nikon F4S, F4 and other professional camera film bodies and switched to digital photography and video back in the late 90’s. The digitization of our society is moving very rapidly and this is only one more example of an established industry leader being displaced by a disruptive innovation.
Search Results For "disruptive innovation"
(PC-Sale image Source Twitpic)
In the Business Insider post Proof that the PC is dying a slow painful death Steve Kovach makes the argument that PC sales are flat-lining and are on the start of a decline. The chart does show a flattening or even a decline in PC sales and when one factors in the explosive growth of the iPhone, iPad and Android it is clear we are seeing a disruptive innovation begin to overtake an established technology. On June 1, 2010 at the All Things Digital Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Steve Jobs made the claim we are living in Post PC era. When asked if tablet will eventually replace the laptop, Jobs replied:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
PCs are going to be like trucks
They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.”
This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.
A great deal has been written about the post-PC era since Jobs interview in 2010. Many people agree with Jobs and as many disagree. Regardless, the sales data regarding the PC does point to the flattening and decline and does show Tablets and other mobile devices in a disruptive growth pattern–so something is happening. In a Forbes article The Post-PC Era Starts To Make Sense, Todd Hixon a long time technology innovator, leader and investor who also writes about entrepreneurs and how they can help reboot complex industries suggests that the post-PC world starts to make sense if we look at how we now use mobile devices to manage our lives. Hixon suggests the post-PC era means three things:
1. Your life is in your Device.
2. Your media and your information are always there, wherever there is.
3. Boundaries between work, home, and friends vanish.
We now have near ubiquitous access to all the world’s information through our Device–access to information all the time everywhere. From an educational perspective the challenge of getting content to our learners can now be solved. I have been cautious to state that we have “near ubiquitous access” because the devices that we currently use are very immature as are the information ecosystems that are emerging. But with the exponential growth of the Internet and now mobile devices the technology piece of the move into the information age can finally be realized.
Technology is the easy part of this transition and we will see it evolve over the next few years.. Moving our society and societal structures is still our biggest challenge. We have spent hundreds of years and immeasurable resources on building our education systems to bring people to the information. It started with the building of libraries and then building of schools and universities around those libraries. Teachers and professors have grown into the information or content experts within our system and students traditionally go to the location of the information to get access to the information and hopefully to learn. Our educational system has focused primarily on the acquisition, management and the delivery of information. In an era when information was scarce or difficult to access this model worked very well. Accessing information is no longer a challenge–our new challenge is assessing information.
Consider the following:
When I searched the term post-PC era in 0.19 seconds I received 42,200,000 results from Google. I knew that I was looking for the interview with Steve Jobs so I was able to quickly move through the results and find what I was looking for. My ability to use Google search effectively and accurately was dependent on my prior knowledge and understanding of the information that I was looking for. Because I am well read and have an extensive background in this subject I was able to quickly and easily discern what was valuable information and what was not. But if one didn’t have the ability to assess what information was valuable and had to look at all the 42 million results it would take a person over 60 years to look at all the results if they spent just 5 seconds on each and reading for 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is more information than a person would have encountered in an entire career 50 years ago and more information that people would have encountered in a lifetime just a few hundred years ago. My friend and colleague, Bill Rankin the Director of Educational Innovation at Abilene Christian University offers the following train of thought regarding the role of educators in this age of digital information:
If I imagine my primary job as a teacher is to serve information, am I helping solve the current informational problem or make it worse?
And given the vast complexity of the informational network, if I insist on my centrality, does that establish or harm my credibility as a teacher?
If assessing information – and the wisdom & experience that requires – is the central challenge of the current informational age, are teachers more or less necessary?
I would argue that teachers, professors and all educators are more important than ever before. Learners need their expertise to help them to learn how to assess the overwhelming flow of information. We are well into the Digital Information Age and our learners need help navigating and assessing the flood of information that they have access to in the palms of their hands. I don’t see this as a challenge but as an opportunity to help prepare our learner for a future that is uncertain. We need to equip our learners with the tools and ability to discern what information is accurate and valuable and to ultimately solve problems that, presently, don’t even exist. What an opportunity!
A few weeks ago I was in Abilene Texas at Abilene Christian University (ACU), which was the first university in the world to hand out iPhones to all its students. This they fall will be giving their students the option of using their mobile technology credit for an iPhone or for an iPad. To stay current some ACU IT staff purchase and experiment with Android tablets to make sure that these devices will work satisfactorily on the university network just in case the occasional student brings one in. Many people speculate that the Android tablets are the only true competition to the iPad so it doesn’t hurt stay up on what devices may also be coming to campus. The Blackbery Playbook is really not even considered as a device to worry about because so few people use or even want them.
What a difference a few weeks make. I am now in Alberta Canada in my new position as the VP Academic of Concordia University College of Alberta and I have been involved in several conversations about the merits of the Blackberry Playbook over the Apple iPad 2. I consider this a moot discussion since the Blackberry Playbook has neither top of mind awareness with more than 82% of people surveyed planning to purchase an iPad compared to 3% planning to purchase a playbook (see above onlinemarkettrend data) nor does it have any market share (3.3% according to Strategy Analysis). RIM advocates may be quick to point out that the iPad market share dropped from 95% to 61% in the past year but that drop was directly due to the fact that it took almost a full year for the wide assortment of Android tablets to come up that now make up 30% of the market. The Blackberry Playbook is at 3.3% which is quite good considering the lack of innovation that RIM has been able to muster with its product line.
Perhaps one of the most significant factors in selecting a tablet is deciding what you plan to do with it…and that means what apps will be available to help you accomplish the desired task. With over a half a million apps in the App store and more than a third of them free the iPad is the clear winner in this category.
If you want to be open for innovation and if you want to bet on what your students will be walking onto campus with then your safer bet is the iPad. Our Concordia Tomorrow strategy emphasizes being student centric–this means we need to know and understand who our students are and what they need. This also includes knowing what they come to campus with. The chances are overwhelming greater that they will be using the iPad or to a lesser extent the Android.
The question of what tablet should one purchase should also be asked with a specific time frame in mind. Any tablet is really a 12 to 18 month device. Whatever you buy today will be replaced in a year to year and a half. The innovation in this space is so significant that these devices will be obsolete much more quickly than PCs or even phones. All hardware companies build in a significant aspect of designed obsolescence into their devices and I would argue that Apple is the best at this. So purchasing and using a Playbook today is fine if that is what you can tether and are prepared to use. Next summer we will be talking about whether one should purchase the iPad 3 or save money on the iPad 2 or perhaps an Android device will have some must have features. I would also be willing to bet on the Android tablets playing a more significant role.
I have my doubts that RIM will be a player in this space. In order to survive they will have to focus on a very small security niche market as many industry writers suggest. It is really too bad. I have used RIM for many years and remember when they were the innovation leader and not the company being displaced by the new disruptive innovation. I started off with the Blackberry 850 and then the 857 shortly after which were the first two devices ever released by RIM so I have a longer history of using the Blackberry then I do with the iPhone. If they truly had a better device I would switch back to RIM in an instant–but they don’t.
It is in everyone’s best interest for the tablet and the smartphone market to have stiff competition from as many vendors as possible. We have lived through over a decade and a half of monopoly with Microsoft and now that we are moving into the post PC era I would hate to be subjected to yet another monopoly.
Is the iPad going to be another classic example of disruptive innovation for the PC in the same way that the PC disrupted the mainframe and mini computer market? It sure seems to be on the right track. The iPad doesn’t offer all the power and functionality of the PC but what it does offer is enough to make people want to use the device in similar yet different ways than the PC. You have the incumbent market leaders (Microsoft, HP, Dell etc.) downplaying the significance of the iPad yet at the same time trying to compete by offering inferior products that don’t really match the power and uniqueness of the iPad.
The PC disruption took many years to really change the landscape of computing but we didn’t have the Internet, social networking and social media that we have today so the accelerated pace that we are seeing with the iPad disruption should not be a surprise. The accelerated pace of disruptive innovation will continue to grow because we are moving from a push to a pull economy. When you consider the millions of apps in the App Store, Apples continued exploitation of the mobile market that it grew with the iPhone, mobility and the mobile market place that Apple created is poised to knock off more than just the likes of Microsoft.
I find it very interesting to read about a disruptive innovation like Facebook which has now become the market leader who is being challenged by Google. The social networking platform Google+ features circles which allows people to organize their connections according to different purposes or needs. You can have close friends, acquaintances, work groups and so on in unique or interconnected circles.
Dhanji R. Prasanna makes the argument that Facebook will not be able to change its core functionality to meet the challenge of circles. With 10 million users in a couple of weeks Google+ has a long way to go to challenge Facebook’s 750,000 users but if any company can challenge Facebook it is Google.
