One of the excellent editors at Harvard Business Publishing forwarded me a link to a BBC article in an email with the subject line: "Could Windows by Disrupted?" I didn't have to click on the link to know the answer is yes.
You see, everything could be disrupted. The important question is will disruption play out in a way that favors or kills the incumbent market leader? The real interesting question is "Will Microsoft disrupt Windows?"
The forces of disruption are at work in every industry. It can happen more quickly in some industries than others, but the potential is omnipresent. And as Clayton Christensen pointed out in his seminal book The Innovators' Dilemma, market leadership isn't just an insufficient buffer against disruption, in some cases it is the root cause of failure.
Consider the management classic In Search of Excellence. While some of the companies featured in the book continued to excel after it was published, companies like Amdahl, Atari, Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak, and Kmart all encountered serious difficulties. In fact, an analysis by IMD Professor Phil Rosenzweig in his worthwhile read The Halo Effect found that the average "excellent" company from In Search of Excellence generally under-performed the stock market in the years after the book's release.
What about Microsoft? ...
Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Management blog.