Its been pointed out to me, re the flippant last line of the last post, that Motorola technology is almost by definition disruptive and you need spend only a fraction of time in the quiet coach of any mainline train to witness this. Fair comment, and our office also has its share of ill-chosen ring tones ranging from the mad-woman singing ‘Ring ring ring’ through to car-horns, whistles and even bleating sheep. One wonders whether the CIA et al are wasting an awful lot of airmiles and potentially damaging international relations when they could more cost-effectively abandon ‘rendering’ or whatever they call it and simply put the suspect in a cell with 15 phones, just out of reach, set to randomly ring. I’d certainly be ready to implicate my nearest and dearest after a couple of hours of that.
Anyway, disruptive having become our little corporate buzz-word some time back it might be worthwhile defining what we mean by it. Well, I’d like to know, for a start.
Initially I assumed it meant disrupting the market, i.e. surprising the incumbent solution providers and becoming a solution of choice for the entire world. Obviously this was mostly going to be by word of mouth given a marketing spend which wouldn’t keep us thirst free in the pub for more than an afternoon. Nevertheless ultimately the world beats a path to our door, Microsoft, Symantec and Google all make outlandish bids for our stock that make Skype look like a steal, we all live happily ever after in a life of untold luxury, and Coventry win the Premier League in 2007. Thus is the market extant ‘disrupted’, but all obviously for the common good.
Alternatively, the technology is so wonderful that another organisation spots what we’re up to, employs half a dozen teenage programmers in Bangalore to copy the concept, releases into an unsuspecting world (bearing in mind we still have to spell out our company name to each and every prospect, such is our presence) accompanied by advertising and marketing spend (which I think we’d describe as ‘cheating’), and everyone beats a path to their door, thereby leading once again to a disrupted market with the slight difference that we all end up selling Big Issues and collecting cardboard for bedding materials, muttering ‘unfair’ and ‘if only’ into our dotage.
The third way, however, is that the technology itself does the disrupting. In this scenario we pretend to be protecting infrastructure and data but there are elements of the code which make subtle improvements to the client’s so-called ‘information’ over an extended period of time, until they can no longer function. The trick of course being they don’t discover this until its way too late to do anything about it other than sue us and our channels for damages. Disruption here is limited to Loftex and its channels and customers, who, fortunately perhaps, number but a few.
There are moments when I suspect we’re going the third way. I hope I’m wrong.
