Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Clayton Christensen in his gound breaking book ‘The innovator’s dilemma’, explains how invincible corporate behemoths get blindsided by dispruption from the below by seemingly inadequate and harmless competition. Surprisngly, this happens not because of bad management decisions but because of prefectly reasonable thinking. These threats start out so small and harmless that it is impractical to react and change your large existing business streams to counter them. But by the time the threats become significant enough to pay attention it is already too late.

Google is an excellent of example of this type of disruption. When google got started, they were seen as this small algorithmic solution provider to portals such as yahoo. Yahoo was already a huge content business and did not see search box as a core piece of their business. They were perfectly happy outsourcing it to this small outfit called google. Yahoo was paying google in single digit million dollars per year which is peanuts compared to their total revenues. So they never saw search as a multi billion dollar business. You know the rest of the story.

But now that google itself has become a thousand pound gorilla, can they be disrupted? Absolutely. But who can disrupt them? If the answer to this question is obvious, I am sure google has enough money to buy them. So no, I do not know who will disrupt them. But I have an idea  on how it may look like. It will not look like a search engine, but it can be used to find some stuff much better than google. You will not even think that you are ’searching’ for information when you use this service to find stuff. In other words, the usage model to find stuff will be completely different than typing stuff in a text box. But its main feature (not search) will be useful to every human being just as google is useful to everyone.

Are there some candidates that fit this bill? Some seem to think twitter could be the one. It does satisfy some of the criteria I mentioned above. But its seach usage still looks too similar for me to believe that they are the one to disrupt google. Can they become a viable competitior? It is possible. One can say the samething about facebook too. I suspect none of these are the real answer.

But I am sure there will be a google disrupter. It will not use search as the metaphor to find information. There may be a couple of girls somewhere working on it right now.