Gorilla Game, Revised Edition, The

Chapter One

Why Is High Tech Different?

First of all, it is not the bits and bytes that make high tech so special, so you don't have to be technical to understand what is going on. Instead, as we will explain in detail in the next chapter, it is the discontinuous innovations that make the difference. Innovation is a concept we are all familiar with—new stuff makes us happy, we buy it, sellers sell it, it's called an economy. Discontinuity is the new idea. It means not compatible with the existing systems. Electric cars, video telephones, and Web TV, for example, all make exciting promises, but none of them can be used without much of the world changing the way they do business. Prospective customers are attracted to the compelling new benefits, but to get them, a whole lot of existing systems will have to change. That creates a battle in the marketplace whose outcome is uncertain.

Sometimes the battle is lost, and the proposed discontinuous innovation simply disappears. The technology lives on, to be sure, finding its way into other products in a later decade, but the products themselves go to th ... read full excerpt from Gorilla Game, Revised Edition, The: Picking Winners in High Technology ebook