The Paradox of the Disrupted

This article by Mark Sigal on GigaOM goes nicely with my post about disruption.


We’re all lemmings in terms of following what works. So when the horizontal model made Bill Gates the richest man in the world, industry after industry embraced it as the one right way.

With the advent of the Internet, however, a vicious cycle of commoditization — horizontal’s downside — began to play out. We are now at the endgame of that cycle, a point where few companies can make money via commodity economics, and HP and Dell are Exhibit A and B, respectively.

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