Disruptive technologies

April 25, 2006 8:48 am Dave Neary gnome

Calum says:

Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing”, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose 🙂

I have two reactions to this:

  1. What, you mean like Mozilla? Firefox started from the Mozilla suite, lots of customers, and 3 to 5 percent market share. OOo is probably around the 3% market share. What customers?

  2. I don’t live in the US, and I’ve never heard Howard Stern’s radio show. But I did see “Private Parts”, which I thought was a very funny film.

    Stern was a disruptive technology – one of the first “shock jocks” to hit the mainstream market at a big network. There’s this one scene in the movie where the Washington station where he’s working is just about to cut him, because all their old, traditional sponsors are deserting them in droves. But Stern knows that the listenership figures are flying up, and the sponsors will follow the listeners.

    Just as the station is reaching its breaking point, and the director is saying once again “That’s it, you’re out”, newer, bigger, better sponsors start rolling in, and the station hits a new high, with Stern as their headline act.

    All disruptive technology has a break with the past, where old assumptions get turned on their head, and the people who can’t keep up hop off the train or get left on the platform. But the visionaries, the ones who know that their ideas, if brought to their logical conclusion, will change the world (or at least US talk-show radio) persist, and take those short term hits because they know that just over the next summit, we descent into the lush green valleys of the promised land.

    OpenOffice.org and GNOME both need to be a bit more like Stern.

2 Responses

  1. Claus Schwarm Says:
    April 25th, 2006 at 11:27 pm

    I disagree: GNOME shouldn’t be a little bit more like Howard Stern.

    If you spend 8 hours a day with an old Motif application to calculate a chemical reaction you don’t mind much about the innovation withing the desktop. If you spend most of your time with a strange KDE application to compose a song, you don’t need an innovative desktop.

    Users only care about content and the means to process the content — they need up-to-date applications, not a desktop that mistakes “being different” for “being disruptive”.

  2. Calum Benson Says:
    April 26th, 2006 at 7:51 am

    Well, I did specify StarOffice rather than OpenOffice 🙂 When Sun bought StarDivision, the product and its user base was already mature, so it didn’t really get the option to start from scratch (although StarDivision themselves did, of course). I don’t know off-hand how many customers have paid Sun for StarOffice, but there’s no doubt it brings in significant money, and it would take brave man to mess with a flagship product. (I don’t deny that part of being disruptive involves making those brave decisions, but that’s always harder with boards and shareholders to keep happy.)

    There’s no disputing that Firefox has done amazingly well, although on the face of it the technology itself doesn’t seem especially disruptive– it’s just one of many decent web browsers out there these days, neither the best nor the worst IMHO. It’s probably more the community that’s done the disrupting in Firefox’s case, which is cool too.