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346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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martinpw ◴[] No.39945361[source]
Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it.

I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

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mrandish ◴[] No.39946158[source]
You highlight one of the most interesting (and perhaps less understood things) about the key Innovator's Dilemma insight. Even if the senior management have read the Innovator's Dilemma books, know they are being catastrophically disrupted and desperately trying to respond - it's still incredibly difficult to actually do.

Not only are virtually all organizational processes and incentives fundamentally aligned against effectively responding, the best practices, patterns and skill sets of most managers at virtually every level are also counter to what they must do to effectively respond. Having been a serial tech startup founder for a couple decades, I then sold one of my startups to a valley tech giant and ended up on the senior leadership team there for a decade. I'd read Innovator's Dilemma in the 90s and now I've now seen it play out from both sides, so I've thought about it a lot. My key takeaway is that an incumbent's lack of effective response to disruption isn't necessarily due to a lack of awareness, conviction or errors in execution. Sure, there are many examples where that's the case but the perverse thing about I.D. is that it can be nearly impossible for the incumbent to effectively respond - even if they recognize the challenge early, commit fully to responding and then do everything within their power perfectly.

I've even spent time sort of "theory crafting" how a big incumbent could try to "harden" themselves in advance against potential disruption. The fundamental challenge is that you end up having to devote resources and create structures which actually make the big incumbent less good at being a big incumbent far in advance of the disruptive threat appearing. It's hard enough to start hardcore, destructive chemo treatment when you actually have cancer. Starting chemo while you're still perfectly healthy and there's literally no evidence of the threat seems crazy. It looks like management incompetence and could arguably be illegal in a publicly traded company ("best efforts to maximize/preserve shareholder value" etc).

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bsder ◴[] No.39946896[source]
"Maximally efficient is minimally robust."

A company that optimizes for efficiency will get stomped flat when the environment changes.

The problem is that there are no incentives in business to optimize for robustness.

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1. roughly ◴[] No.39947553[source]
Well, that’s partially because of the converse: a company that optimizes for robustness will get stomped flat before the environment changes to require robustness. Short term games are bad in the long term, but often good enough in the short term to win before the long term arrives.