Interlude - Index of

124 | Grown-Up Company
don’t need a separate desktop. If a vendor offered me a laptop
that was twice as fast, I would say, “I’d rather have the same
speed at half the price. Why not make it lighter? Or make the
batteries last longer. And while you’re at it, make it cooler so
my lap doesn’t get so hot.” Laptop performance is improving
much faster than my needs are increasing. When customers
no longer care whether a particular aspect of a product gets
any better, Christensen calls it a goodness oversupply. (I love that
concept!) There’s nothing wrong with a goodness oversupply,
but people won’t pay extra for it.
A second point in the book is that two parallel markets
often focus on roughly the same problem, one for high-end
customers and the other for low-end customers. A good example
from outside the high-tech world is the personal music
market, with the living room stereo and the iPod. Often the
low-end product has other advantages besides cost. The iPod
fits in my pocket, so for portable music, it’s much better. Buying
music is easier too because I can download it online.
As low-end products improve, they eventually get good
enough to satisfy the market above them, and they have advantages
that help them win. Not only are they cheaper, but
because they are designed for less sophisticated users, they are
simpler to use. Since they aim at a larger market, they often
have higher unit volumes, which drives costs down even more.
They may have other advantages besides, as with the iPod. All
this makes it very difficult for the high-end vendors to defend
themselves.
Christensen’s theories helped me understand how NetApp
and NAS could win against larger and more entrenched competitors,
first against Auspex, and later against major IT ven-