A New Market Disruption

Asymco’s Horace Dediu commenting on The Globe and Mail’s article Inside the fall of Blackberry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt:

The iPhone was not a low-end disruption. It was exactly the opposite. The BlackBerry and the Nokia products were striving for the low end. They observed the discipline of constrained resources. They were expanding into emerging markets. They watched every fraction of a penny on the bill of materials. The low end was manna for the whole industry. Even Microsoft with Windows Mobile was better positioned for the low end than Apple. Instead, what Apple did was unthinkable. It entered with a high end product. It even promoted its high price ($500, subsidized!) This is why it was laughed at. Theirs was “the Mac in a phone” idea. The reason it worked was that it was not a phone. The reason it worked is because it was the hardest disruption to spot: A new market disruption