顛覆性創新理論不適用於蘋果

He may have been right about disk drives, mechanical excavators and steel mills. But Clayton Christensen, whose theory of disruptive innovation underpins much of current business management thought, was wrong about Apple.

克萊頓o克里斯坦森開創的顛覆性創新理論(disruptive innovation)，也許適用於磁盤驅動器、機械挖掘機和鍊鋼廠，但遇到蘋果（Apple）時，這項被當前許多企業管理思想作爲基石的理論就不靈了。

Not just in 2006, when he foresaw the imminent demise of the iPod. Or in 2007, when he said that the iPhone would not succeed. Or in 2012, when he predicted that Apple’s integrated iPhones and iPads would succumb to Samsung’s and Google’s Modular approach.

他曾經在2006年預測iPod即將消亡，在2007年表示iPhone不會取得成功，也曾在2012年預測稱，集成化的iPhone和iPad最終將敗給三星（Samsung）和谷歌（Google）的模塊化產品。

“Christensen is going to go zero for three,” quipped Stratechery‘s Ben Thompson in September.

科技博客Stratechery的撰稿人本o湯普森在今年9月表示：“克里斯坦森的三個預測沒有一個正確。”

Christensen has been taking his lumps lately, and not just in the blogosphere. In June he was attacked at length in The New Yorker by a fellow Harvard academic, Jill Lapore, who cataloged errors and oversights in his seminal texts: The Innovator’s Dilemma(1997) and The Innovator’s Solution (2003).

近來，克里斯坦森遭受了不少筆誅口伐，而且不僅僅是在博客圈。今年6月，他的哈佛大學(Harvard University)同事吉爾o拉波爾在《紐約客》（The New Yorker）雜誌上發表了長篇檄文，猛烈批判克里斯坦森，文中還引用了克里斯坦森著作《創新者的窘境》（The Innovator’s Dilemma，1997年出版）和《創新者的解決之道》（The Innovator’s Solution，2003年出版）中的錯誤和紕漏。

Lapore was largely dismissed in tech circles as a history professor who knew little about managing high tech and less about the nature of academic theories.

拉波爾是一位歷史學教授，對如何管理高科技公司並不在行，更不用說研究相關領域的學術理論了，因此他的批評並未受到科技圈的廣泛關注。

Not so easily dismissed are more recent critiques by tech experts like Ben Thompson (What Clay Christensen got wrong) or Ben Bajarin (Disrupting Disruption Theory) or Jean Louis Gassée (Clayton Christensen becomes his own devil’s advocate).

然而最近，來自科技專家本o湯普森的文章《克雷o克里斯坦森錯在哪裏》、本o巴加林的《推翻顛覆性創新理論》、以及簡o路易斯o加斯撰寫的文章《克雷o克里斯坦森是其自身魔鬼的擁護者》，也紛紛提出了批評。他們可就不容易被忽視了。

Or, for that matter, Horace Dediu, one of Christensen’s most prominent defenders.

甚至連克里斯坦森最知名的擁護者霍雷斯o德迪歐，現在也站到了質疑者的行列。

Dediu has made a career of popularizing Christensen’s ideas, spreading the gospel of disruption in his Asymco blogs, his Critical Path podcasts and his Airshow padcasts. The theory, he says, draws its narrative strength from one of mankind’s oldest stories: The rise of the underdog. David and Goliath. The weak defeating the strong.

德迪歐一直以普及克里斯坦森的思想爲己任，在他的博客Asymco、播客Critical Path和Airshow上竭力傳播顛覆性創新理論福音。他表示，這一理論從落魄者的崛起、大衛擊敗歌利亞、弱者擊敗強者等等這些人類最古老的故事中汲取了敘事力量。

Yet in a discussion on Bajarin’s Techpinions podcast last month, even Dediu had to admit that Christensen’s theory must be adapted to fit the market for consumer tech. “When it comes to consumers,” he says, “there are some twists to the plot.”

然而，上月在參加巴加林的播客Techpinions進行的一個討論時，甚至連德迪歐也不得不承認，克里斯坦森的理論必須有所調整，才能適應科技消費品市場。他表示：“一旦涉及到消費者，情況就會有些變化。”

The problem, Thompson, Bajarin and Dediu all agree, is that the theory emerged from an analysis of business-to-business markets where purchase decisions are made by business managers, not consumers. Business managers tend to make rational decisions that have more to do with dollars and cents than with the experience of using a product.

湯普森、巴加林和德迪歐都承認，問題的根源在於，這套理論源於克里斯坦森對B2B市場（即企業對企業市場）所做的分析。在這個市場中，做出購買決定的是企業管理者，而不是消費者。企業管理者做出的理性決策往往是基於經濟方面的核算，而非使用產品的體驗。

Consumers care about dollars and cents too, but they also care about a host of other factors — things like ease of use, brand loyalty and what their friends are using. Marketing departments spend millions to understand the subtle differences that make consumers buy one product and not another. It’s a well-studied field. Most tech companies, however, know nothing about it.

消費者也重視金錢，但他們同樣重視一系列其他因素——易用性、品牌忠誠度，以及他們的朋友會使用什麼產品。營銷部門動輒花費數百萬美元來了解促使消費者做出不同購買決定的細微差異。這是一個被深入研究的領域。然而，大部分科技公司對此還一無所知。

“What Apple figured out,” Dediu says, “is that if they learned just 10% of what is known about how consumers behave and applied some of that theory to their products, they could make them more desirable to average people.”

德迪歐表示：“蘋果的發現是：只要他們能掌握僅僅10%的消費者行爲學知識，並活學活用，他們就能生產出對普通大衆更具誘惑力的產品。”

It helped, according to Dediu, that Steve Jobs was an “instinctive disruptor.”

德迪歐說，這很管用，史蒂夫o喬布斯是“天生的顛覆者”。

Dediu is bullish about Apple Watch, even though the attraction of the luxury watch market escapes him. He already finds himself at sea in contemporary shopping malls, where there is almost nothing he wants to buy and where 95% of purchase decisions are being made not on the basis of functionality, but for purely psychological reasons.

德迪歐很看好蘋果手錶，儘管奢侈品手錶市場對他沒什麼吸引力。他發現在當今的購物商場中，他有些無所適從，他幾乎沒有想買的東西，而95%的購買決定都不是基於功能需求，而是純粹的心理需求。

“Why are people in this shop and not the shop next door that seems to be selling the same products?” he asks toward the end of the podcast. “These things are mysterious to me.”

在播客討論的最後，他問道：“爲什麼人們會在這家店裏，而不是在銷售同樣產品的隔壁店裏買東西？對我來說，這是件神奇的事情。”（財富中文網）