Dominant Designs and Technology Cycles
By Sam Mishra, Author, Strategic Case AnalysisIn the hyper-competitive world of high-tech (and biotech and the newly emerging clean-tech) businesses, to be able to build products and product lines and product platforms, a firm has to frequently disrupt its existing product lines / business models with new ones. However, this is easier said than done. As articulated in the S-curves section of this portal, Sun did not heed to the Linux onslaught (on cheaper servers), and succumbed to the market forces going for more cost-effective Linux (as opposed to Solaris) hardware: today, it is an Oracle business unit (like Siebel or PeopleSoft), and 2000 of its employees are on the chopping block of being laid off in this era of rising unemployment coupled with a jobless recovery.
When a new technology product succeeds in the market place, the technology underneath goes through a cycle, as depicted below. This is an evolution from what was first articulated by Tushman, Michael, and Rosenkopf, Lori in “Organizational Determinants of Technological Change: Towards a Sociology of Technological Evolutions", Research in Organizational Behavior, VOL 14. If you have read my articles on S-Curves, you can appreciate terms like "Ferment" and "Maturity" in the boxes below.
What might intrigue you, and what the holy grail of product marketing truly is, is this concept called "Dominant Design." So, what is a "Dominant Design?" What is the dominant design in Internet Search? Is i-Phone the dominant design amongst smart phones? What is a technology cycle? Why is a Business Model unproven until the dominant design emerges? Listen to my podcast to learn more...
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