How to lose a monopoly: will regulators cause it (hint: no) or yourself?
No time to wait: adoption curves are shortening. Credit: Asymco
Rather, the iPhone created such a radical change in every assumption about how you would make a ‘smartphone’ that everyone else had to start again from scratch. It’s important to remember that none of the smartphone companies who’d been building things since the late 1990s - Nokia/Symbian, Palm, RIM and Microsoft - managed the transition. None of the others had anti-trust issues. But, they all had platforms, and just as importantly cultures and assumptions, that were based on the constraints of hardware and networks in 2000, whereas the iPhone was based on what hardware and networks would look like in 2010. The only way to compete was with a totally new platform and totally new assumptions about how it would work, and ‘dump our platform and build an entirely new one’ is always a near-death experience in technology. Failing to make it isn’t about a lack of aggression or execution - it’s that it’s really hard.
From Benedict Evans, insightful as always.
Remember I wrote recently about the banking sector and disruption? This is their challenge if the upstart banks really develop something revolutionary: can the ‘traditional’ banks make the transition? Regulation won’t cause a leader to lose its leading position, being stable and not innovating will - even if truly uncomfortable to do so.