PRUEBAS

Source: An earlier version of this figure was published in Clayton M. Christensen, “The Rigid DiskDrive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence,” Business History Review 67,no. 4 (Winter 1993): 559.It is unclear how long the marketers at Microsoft, Intel, and Seagate can succeed in creating demandfor whatever functionality their technologists can supply. Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software, forexample, required 1.2 MB of disk storage capacity in its version 1.2, released in 1987. Its version 5.0,released in 1995, required 32 MB of disk storage capacity. Some industry observers believe that if ateam of developers were to watch typical users, they would find that functionality has substantiallyovershot mainstream market demands. If true, this could create an opportunity for a disruptivetechnology—applets picked off the internet and used in simple internet appliances rather than in fullfunctioncomputers, for example—to invade this market from below.RIGHT AND WRONG STRATEGIESWhich of the strategies illustrated in Figure 9.4 is best? This study finds clear evidence that there is noone best strategy. Any of the three, consciously pursued, can be successful. Hewlett-Packard’s pursuitof the first strategy in its laser jet printer business has been enormously profitable. In this instance, ithas been a safe strategy as well, because HP is attacking its own position with disruptive ink-jettechnology. Compaq Computer and the trinity of Intel, Microsoft, and the disk drive makers havesuccessfully—at least to date—implemented the second and third strategies, respectively.These successful practitioners have in common their apparent understanding—whether explicit orintuitive—of both their customers’ trajectories of need and their own technologists’ trajectories of156