Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen Says Uber Is Not Disruptive

[vt]

http://www.pymnts.com/opinion/2015/p...ny-other-name/

[vt]

Re: Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen Says Uber Is Not Disruptive

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-...a-vivek-wadhwa

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen Says Uber Is Not Disruptive

Is it semantics?

I've just started using Uber a few times.

Putting latent capacity(private vehicle fleets) to work is disruptive isn't it?

I remember working on the problem of LTL inefficiency and the potential of the Internet to match and fill all that empty cube like a giant national logistics version of Tetris in the late 90's.

We got too preoccupied on other projects at Amazon to solve it.

If the word disruptive doesn't work then the term game changer certainly does.

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I would think something that modulates and limits the "level of disruptive ness" is bureaucracy.

For example, if a municipality, state, country makes Uber illegal unless geodata and revenue data are shared and taxed, then it would turn down that "disruptive ness dial" from an 8 to a 4 wouldn't it?

if I was a municipal, state, or federal financial manager I'd be thinking cut costs on physical compliance of taxi cabs and focus on raising revenue directly thru Uber. Tax uber on each transaction/location/distance/etc.

Battle between Uber(and Uber shareholder) campaign contributions and the dollar signs from specialist tax collection.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen Says Uber Is Not Disruptive

It seems the professor has a lot of rules in his definition of what "disruptive" really means. Any new entrant into a business who seriously threatens the incumbent can be viewed as disruptive even if the newcomer is largely the same as the incumbents.

I would say that Uber is not disruptive to the taxicab industry as the digital camera was disruptive to the film and analog camera industries. Uber does not make obsolete its competition.

My view of Uber is, ignoring that they are exploiting a potential loophole in regulatory laws, that they have invested heavily in an IT back end that the taxicab companies have not. The taxicab companies have a government-granted monopoly and got fat and lazy--a typical outcome of monopolies--and did not invest smartly in their back end dispatching operations.

But I think Uber is an interesting case study of how a good, custom-tailored IT back end can greatly enhance a company's performance. Other corporations in the U.S. really ought to consider very carefully how they view IT. Almost always, every corporation I've seen views it as a cost that they very grudgingly bear and are constantly looking to lower costs while not maintaining or improving quality.

For companies without some special, high barrier to entry, IT (efficiency) is the Achilles' heel that competitors can use to disrupt or destroy the company.