Bring ‘Da Ruckus
Clay Christensen recently spoke with Jeff Howe at Wired and shared his thoughts on what industries will be disrupted next by the Web (via GigaOm):
Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.
Some people love to claim they’re all about innovation and disruption. Very few actually are, because when real disruption occurs, entire industries get upended and lots of people lose money. Just look at what the iPad is doing the “traditonal” PC industry.
It takes real balls to embrace disruption, but the alternative is worse—Falling to the wayside and becoming irrelevant.
As someone who has been designing websites for over 13 years (and most recently mobile applications), things are constantly in flux for me. I used to make most of my living designing and programming sites with Adobe Flash. Now we’re not only in a post-PC world, but a post-plug-in world.
I always keep this quote by Charles Darwin in my head:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
I don’t care what industry you work in. If you live by those words, you’ll be in good shape.