Christensen-style disruption sounds rather like Gresham's Law ("bad money drives out good"), but I don't think the mechanism is the same: one can hoard old silver coins and sell those at a profit for the silver content, but there's no premium I know of for better technology -- probably because "better technology" seems to imply aesthetics, but newer, "lessor technology" is likely to be much faster while using less energy.

On 6/28/22 10:41 AM, Clem Cole wrote:


On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 9:15 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:
My perception of the debate at the time was that it pitted proprietary networking (SNA, DECNet, ...) against open networking (TCP/IP).  The hardware vendors wanted proprietary networking to lock customers into their equipment, but that dog would not hunt.
Metcalfe's law: "value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system." The problem with a walled garden is that it can only grow as large as the walls allow. 

It was pretty clear that except for the clever encapsulation stuff that Vint had done with IP, the TCP/IP world was quick and dirty and quite slapdash.  But it was non-proprietary and that is what won the race.
Point taken, but I actually think it is more of a Christensen-style disruption where the 'lessor technology' outstrips the more sophisticated one because it finds/creates a new market that values that new technology for what it is and cares less about the ways it may be 'lessor.'

I described this in a talk I did at Asilomar a few years back.  This is the most important slide:
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