PRUEBAS

its major customers and replace the lost revenues with sales of the new product line to an entirelydifferent group of desktop computer makers. Mabon remembers the experience as the most exhaustingof his life.Micropolis finally introduced a 3.5-inch product in 1993. That was the point at which the product hadprogressed to pack more than 1 gigabyte in the 3.5-inch platform. At that level, Micropolis could sellthe 3.5-inch drive to its existing customers.Figure 5.1 Technology Transition and Market Position at Micropolis CorporationSource: Data are from various issues of Disk/Trend Report.DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE THEORY OF RESOURCE DEPENDENCEThe struggles recounted earlier of Seagate Technology’s attempts to sell 3.5-inch drives and of BucyrusErie’s failed attempt to sell its early Hydrohoe only to its mainstream customers illustrate how thetheory of resource dependence can be applied to cases of disruptive technologies. In both instances,Seagate and Bucyrus were among the first in their industries to develop these disruptive products. Butdespite senior managers’ decisions to introduce them, the impetus or organizational energy required tolaunch the products aggressively into the appropriate value networks simply did not coalesce—untilcustomers needed them.Should we then accept the corollary stipulated by resource-dependence theorists that managers aremerely powerless individuals? Hardly. In the Introduction, exploring the image of how people learnedto fly, I noted that all attempts had ended in failure as long as they consisted of fighting fundamentallaws of nature. But once laws such as gravity, Bernoulli’s principle, and the notions of lift, drag andresistance began to be understood, and flying machines were designed that accounted for or harnessed93