A bit about the dilemma of the innovator in IT
In 1997, Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, finished and published his book “The Dilemma of Innovator. How large companies are dying because of new technologies. ” In a small book of 2 chapters, the essence of “disruptive” innovations and their impact on business is described in detail. In due time, inspired by this book, we decided to create our own widget.
In the book, Christensen gives a clear definition of the innovator's dilemma - this is “the phenomenon when people who invent something turn out to be the last to see what is behind it”. It looks like this:
The innovator's dilemma is directly related to the concept of “reinventing the wheel” - a phenomenon when someone simply copies something from someone. However, the bicycle itself was created by more than one person - in 1817, Professor Drez created the first bicycle, but he was without pedals. After 20 years, Thomas McCall invented the pedals, but could not make the wheels were equal in size - it was only in 1885 that John Starley collected everything that was invented before him, added his research and created a bicycle in the form in which we know now.
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If you look at the development of technologies or individual services over the past 30-40 years, you can see that this is exactly the case in IT.
Facebook was not the first social network - SixDegrees appeared in 1997, and still had Classmates (however, it’s hard to call it a social network, so it’s accepted that SixDegrees was the first social network in the world).
By the time Zuckerberg sat down to write the first line of code for Facebook, Ryze (2001), Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003) were already in the US. In Asia and Latin America were BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, LunarStorm and Cyworld.
Moreover, Facebook was not the first social network for students - back in 2001, Orkut Buyukkoten launched the Stanford Club Nexus at Stanford, which it then bought by Google and renamed it in honor of the creator. By the way, the project did not take off and in 2014 closed.
Long before Segalovich created Yandex, and Page and Brin - Google, in the mecca of technology, MIT, students created the world's first search engine, called Wandex. It was 1993. All subsequent search engines used the developments and the Wandex algorithm, making their improvements in it.
In 1994, McAfee, now known for its protection systems, created the PowWow messenger, which became the progenitor of AOL and ICQ.
And of course, the most audacious pirate foray into IT, performed by IBM and Apple, when Xerox PARC took over and even stole, in places, among other things, the technology of displaying information on the screen in raster graphics.
If you look at the history of each product or company that today is the market leader, then you can see that the percentage of pioneers among them is quite small. Almost always, someone creates technology, and someone improves it and presses down the market for themselves. Naturally, provided that it is really disruptive technology.
By the way, back to the book. In the same place, the term “creative destruction” first appeared - a phenomenon when a new technology is so subversive that it kills the previous one and its leader. The most striking example is film photography and Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
In 2014, we worked in the same company and installed several callback widgets on our site. We liked the idea very much, but we saw that each of them has flaws - someone has a non-working caliper, others do not control obsession, and others have too high prices. We decided to take the technology, improve it and sell at the lowest price. So appeared Rocket Callback.
What exactly we have improved:
1. Made it possible to set a photo manager, so that customers know with whom they communicate. This is just the beginning, since our plans are to make a fully personalized widget so that the manager also knows who is calling him. To do this, we will try to use the Facebook Messenger API, Zopim experience and callback technology.
2. Made a fully adjustable obsession, so that the widget was hell at 100% indicator or appeared only by clicking at 0% indicator. You can hide the button altogether, and it will catch its own clients when entering or leaving the page.
3. They made the widget smart, so that it learns and determines for itself who to offer the call and who does not. All data (user transitions, mouse movements, scrolling, inaction, requests, clicks, transition sources, visit number) are thrown into our Hadoop on Azure, and then we launch it in Machine Learning. So Rocket collects information about the visitor and adapts to a particular site.
4. Made it possible to choose a color. Trifle, but nice. 10 primary colors, setting the palette, up to transparent, adjusting the size and location of the button, the size of the widget window, the color of the button. You can go to our site, enter your address and see how the widget will look, play with color.
5. Established the lowest price in Russia. For example, now we have 1 tariff - $ 7. At today's rate it is about 370 rubles. 50 minutes for 370 rubles. If we consider that each conversation lasts about 2 minutes, then 50 minutes is 25 potential customers for 370 rubles. Moreover, the quality of communication, we also tried to bring to the ideal.
Naturally, all this is never a disruptive technology, but only improvements and development, but they already provide us with a difference from competitors. Well, plus we have several plans - personification, improvement of AI, update the design, expand the configuration tool, integrate with CRM and other services, add analytics.
Returning to the dilemma. It really exists, and the only question is that who and how can improve the technology invented by others. We hope that we will be able to realize all the plans, and we will be able to move so far away from the original product that it will be a new technology, which, in turn, will be improved by someone else, bringing it to another new one. And so on to infinity. We advise, by the way, to read a book - despite the fact that it was published back in 1997, it is still relevant, as it contains a scientific approach.
Thank you for reading us!
Subscribe to our blog .
In the book, Christensen gives a clear definition of the innovator's dilemma - this is “the phenomenon when people who invent something turn out to be the last to see what is behind it”. It looks like this:
The innovator's dilemma is directly related to the concept of “reinventing the wheel” - a phenomenon when someone simply copies something from someone. However, the bicycle itself was created by more than one person - in 1817, Professor Drez created the first bicycle, but he was without pedals. After 20 years, Thomas McCall invented the pedals, but could not make the wheels were equal in size - it was only in 1885 that John Starley collected everything that was invented before him, added his research and created a bicycle in the form in which we know now.
')
If you look at the development of technologies or individual services over the past 30-40 years, you can see that this is exactly the case in IT.
Facebook was not the first social network - SixDegrees appeared in 1997, and still had Classmates (however, it’s hard to call it a social network, so it’s accepted that SixDegrees was the first social network in the world).
By the time Zuckerberg sat down to write the first line of code for Facebook, Ryze (2001), Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003) were already in the US. In Asia and Latin America were BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, LunarStorm and Cyworld.
Moreover, Facebook was not the first social network for students - back in 2001, Orkut Buyukkoten launched the Stanford Club Nexus at Stanford, which it then bought by Google and renamed it in honor of the creator. By the way, the project did not take off and in 2014 closed.
Long before Segalovich created Yandex, and Page and Brin - Google, in the mecca of technology, MIT, students created the world's first search engine, called Wandex. It was 1993. All subsequent search engines used the developments and the Wandex algorithm, making their improvements in it.
In 1994, McAfee, now known for its protection systems, created the PowWow messenger, which became the progenitor of AOL and ICQ.
And of course, the most audacious pirate foray into IT, performed by IBM and Apple, when Xerox PARC took over and even stole, in places, among other things, the technology of displaying information on the screen in raster graphics.
If you look at the history of each product or company that today is the market leader, then you can see that the percentage of pioneers among them is quite small. Almost always, someone creates technology, and someone improves it and presses down the market for themselves. Naturally, provided that it is really disruptive technology.
“Disruptive innovations” are innovations that change the balance of values in the market. At the same time, old products become uncompetitive simply because the parameters on the basis of which the competition was previously held become unimportant.
By the way, back to the book. In the same place, the term “creative destruction” first appeared - a phenomenon when a new technology is so subversive that it kills the previous one and its leader. The most striking example is film photography and Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
In 2014, we worked in the same company and installed several callback widgets on our site. We liked the idea very much, but we saw that each of them has flaws - someone has a non-working caliper, others do not control obsession, and others have too high prices. We decided to take the technology, improve it and sell at the lowest price. So appeared Rocket Callback.
What exactly we have improved:
1. Made it possible to set a photo manager, so that customers know with whom they communicate. This is just the beginning, since our plans are to make a fully personalized widget so that the manager also knows who is calling him. To do this, we will try to use the Facebook Messenger API, Zopim experience and callback technology.
2. Made a fully adjustable obsession, so that the widget was hell at 100% indicator or appeared only by clicking at 0% indicator. You can hide the button altogether, and it will catch its own clients when entering or leaving the page.
3. They made the widget smart, so that it learns and determines for itself who to offer the call and who does not. All data (user transitions, mouse movements, scrolling, inaction, requests, clicks, transition sources, visit number) are thrown into our Hadoop on Azure, and then we launch it in Machine Learning. So Rocket collects information about the visitor and adapts to a particular site.
4. Made it possible to choose a color. Trifle, but nice. 10 primary colors, setting the palette, up to transparent, adjusting the size and location of the button, the size of the widget window, the color of the button. You can go to our site, enter your address and see how the widget will look, play with color.
5. Established the lowest price in Russia. For example, now we have 1 tariff - $ 7. At today's rate it is about 370 rubles. 50 minutes for 370 rubles. If we consider that each conversation lasts about 2 minutes, then 50 minutes is 25 potential customers for 370 rubles. Moreover, the quality of communication, we also tried to bring to the ideal.
Naturally, all this is never a disruptive technology, but only improvements and development, but they already provide us with a difference from competitors. Well, plus we have several plans - personification, improvement of AI, update the design, expand the configuration tool, integrate with CRM and other services, add analytics.
Returning to the dilemma. It really exists, and the only question is that who and how can improve the technology invented by others. We hope that we will be able to realize all the plans, and we will be able to move so far away from the original product that it will be a new technology, which, in turn, will be improved by someone else, bringing it to another new one. And so on to infinity. We advise, by the way, to read a book - despite the fact that it was published back in 1997, it is still relevant, as it contains a scientific approach.
Thank you for reading us!
Subscribe to our blog .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/291068/
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