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- After several years of research, and a close reading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which introduced the concept of the paradigm shift), Foster came up with an explanation. What threatened these well-run market leaders were what he called “technological discontinuities”—moments when the dominant technology in a market abruptly shifted, and the expertise and scale that the companies had built up suddenly didn’t count for much. One example: when electronic cash registers went from 10 percent of the market in 1972 to 90 percent just four years later, NCR, long the leading maker of cash registers, was caught unprepared, resulting in big losses and mass layoffs.
I enjoyed the above image from Matt Chase.
camarillobrillo · 4016 days ago · link ·
There's the problem. We can't have it both ways. There was a highwater mark around the dawn of the new millennium that went completely wasted. We have never recovered. The pessimist in me says we never will. So it goes.All that disrupts is good; all that stands in disruption’s way (such as, say, San Francisco taxi companies or metropolitan daily newspapers) deserves to perish.
Most worrying of all, the burst of productivity growth that started in 1995 and is widely attributed to the use of new information technologies also seems to have ended in the early 2000s.