Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?

Disruptive innovations have weird metabolisms. They have a cost structure and product-market fit that are alien—even toxic—to incumbents, like blue-green algae eating sunlight and generating oxygen. Incumbent companies can’t adapt to it. It’s not in their DNA.

Why didn’t the web disrupt mobile?A computer that could go everywhere with you? This turned out to be a big deal. Mobile ate the world. It was a Great Oxidation Event.

Disruptions upend the competitive landscape. Atmospheres change. Successful companies choke. New companies emerge. Technologies are lost. Ecosystems collapse. Value networks are dissolved and reformed.

Disruptive innovations don’t compete against incumbents, they compete with nonconsumption. They start where there is no competition, at the low-end of a market, or in a completely new market. What they offer is not better. It is different. It shifts the basis of competition.

Why is it that most changes are marginal, but a few, like the Great Oxidation Event, are deeply disruptive? The answer is in asymmetry.When we think of competition, we usually picture symmetric competition. Trees compete on height for sunlight, businesses on price for customers. But you can only grow so tall, or lower prices so much. Competition se... See more