Whenever a Silicon Valley company has a new product, the founders and backers always claim it's a breakthrough, game-changing technology. But sometimes what they really mean is it's faster or a bit cheaper. Those are good characteristics, but what really makes a product disruptive?
During some recent travel, I decided to crack open Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Solution," a follow-up to his original work "The Innovator's Dilemma." Everyone in Silicon Valley has heard of Clayton Christensen, but I'm not sure everyone has taken his message to heart.
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The key idea in Christensen's work is to distinguish between sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations. Sustaining innovations are those that improve a product to appeal to the most demanding customers. These can be incremental improvements or breakthroughs. A disruptive innovation, on the other hand, is aimed at serving a market of new or less-demanding customers with a product that may be inferior, but simpler to use.
That's pretty close to the strategy we used at MySQL. Rather than compete head on with companies that were a thousand times our size, we focused on the underserved market of Web developers. We decided early on that MySQL would not compete on features; that was a battle we would never win. But we could compete on ease of use, performance, and cost, using a strategy of co-existence rather than replacement. A key element was to serve the underserved; for many developers, MySQL was their first database. Other database companies that tried to "out-Oracle Oracle" largely failed, whether they were open source or not.
Christensen posits a set of questions that act as a litmus test on disruption:
