It Is Easy For People To Miss Disruptive Trends
A colleague sent this over to me today. It's from an essay called "It Is Easy For People To Miss Disruptive Trends," posted today on TechDirt.
"People are notoriously bad at recognizing important trends in innovation. It's most commonly seen in people dismissing some new technology or service as being unimportant. Over and over again, people seem to think that the world is static and thus, people "won't need" certain technologies in the future...."
And he continues:
"...I'd say that if people aren't missing the trend, then it's not disruptive. What makes disruptive innovation so disruptive is often the very fact that so many people dismiss it and insist that nothing will come of it. It's that dismissiveness that often helps the innovation become so powerful, because it gets better and better while people are so busy writing it off. And then, suddenly, it's ready and the world wants it. And the incumbent players, who dismissed it, all feel taken by surprise. "
Last week I was watching the Twitter feed for a European conference (I wasn't attending), and people were debating the value of social reading, discussing how they didn't think anyone wanted conversations in their books. That was weird. After all, I can't imagine pitching them on Twitter a decade ago, "it's a backchannel that lets you have a conversation with other people in the room while a presentation is going on." Right. Explained like that, most people would have agreed they don't want a digital way to talk about a presentation while the presentation is, well, being presented, especially with people sitting in the same room. But it is now a conference requirement.
It's a bit hard to tell how things will work out. So often it's about how a technology is integrated that matters.
