When philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," he could have been talking about the adoption of a disruptive technology like RSS. History has shown that disruptive innovations have toppled established solution providers—not because the providers were unaware of the innovation, but because they believed it incapable of satisfying the demands of their established market. In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen makes the following observations: "Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."
RSS fits nicely into this model. RSS is technologically straightforward, is built on widely accepted standards, and offers simplistic functionality. Indeed, RSS lacks capabilities demanded by various established markets. For example, Steven J. Bell, Director of the Library, Paul J. Gutman Library, Philadelphia University, recently wrote, "Nothing I’ve read or experienced while using RSS and news aggregators convinces me they are yet perfected enough to offer the fine-grain tuning that produces the control required for a true strategic approach to keeping up." However, RSS has attributes that are highly valued in numerous "emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.". This last point is key to understanding why (and how) RSS is, in fact, a disruptive innovation. As Christensen also points out, "the purpose of advanced technology development [is] to sustain established trajectories of performance improvement..." RSS has been widely adopted in several sizeable markets (e.g., weblogs, news syndication, corporate portals) and these markets will continue to demand improvements. From the perspective of established RSS markets, these will be sustaining improvements. However, it is likely that many of these improvements will address requirements of unrelated markets—say, for example, university library systems. From the perspective of unrelated markets, these will be disruptive improvements; that is, "all of a sudden", RSS will become an attractive alternative to existing solutions. This phenomenon is nothing new. In response to Bell's article, Chris Pirillo offers a nice collection of examples of history repeating itself: the Web, NCSA Mosaic, and Windows. In each case, its not like the established solution providers were unaware of the new technology. In fact, they were the people explaining how and why the new technology was insufficient to meet the requirements of their market. History is repeating itself with RSS. |
