- Can you get too close to your customers?
Existing customers rightfully play a key role in just about all aspects of a successful company, including that of evaluating new and emerging technologies. Whereas existing customers may well support the development of sustaining technology which improves the attributes customers already value, customers should not be trusted with the role as arbiter over disruptive technology that presents other attributes than the ones mainstream customers value, normally performing well below existing technologies initially (Bower & Christensen 1995, 3).
In fact, the principles that induces a well-managed company to focus on meeting the needs of existing customers (financial requirements, reducing risks by serving existing customers in known markets) are the very same that blind them from seeing the potential of disruptive technologies. By the time a new technology has evolved sufficiently to meet
the needs of mainstream customers it will be too late: first-mover advantages will ensure that the pioneers remain the champions of the new market.
Traditional rules of management makes it almost impossible for an emerging technology with an unknown market to compete for resources with an existing customer in an existing market. As a result, the responsibility for building a disruptive technology business should be placed in an independent organization (Bower & Christensen 1995, 2).
Many have for some time now been promoting Ruby on Rails – a web development framework that promises to reduce the time-to-market and cost-of-ownership of software projects. Based on a dynamic programming language – Ruby – and written with ease of use in mind this technology is much more expressive and lowers the maintenance
cost of software substantially. A breakthrough some time ago made it possible to run programs written in Ruby on the same hardware and software that run Java applications, which means that one of the important barriers to entry suddenly disappeared. Other important concerns have been performance and if the programming language itself is
suitable for large enterprise projects. As technology and tools have evolved quickly, these concerns are getting smaller day by day – and adoption increases.
Many companies have successfully completed a few projects (often with new customers) using this technology – many large players are still hesitant. There seems to be a subs
tantial overweight of smaller startup companies that takes on this technology, which leads me to believe that most organizations would have been more successful had they placed the responsibility for developing this technology in an independent organization – a startup for instance. Existing companies are reluctant to use it in their existing applications, and the right market and the right applications seems far away…
Bower, J. L & Christensen, C. M. 1995, Disruptive Technologies – Catching the wave.
Harvard Business Review, January – Febuary 1995, digital reprint.
