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We talked a lot about "Disruption" today as we described firms and brands who failed to adapt and innovate their way out of unfavourable markets and market-evolutions. Cory Doctorow (co-author of Chokepoint Capitalism) blogged about this very subject today (a quoted section is below) , as with all his posts the links are super valuable. This links to the original research which starts with a literature review of research on disruption. It's like he's doing your homework for you........

 

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/

 

When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.

But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are other digital businesses.

And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

 

The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption.