When Matt Christensen was at Duke, Blue Devil fans became very familiar with his late father, Clayton, and his business theory of disruption, which is now broadly accepted.
Christensen graduated from Duke in 2004. Unbeknownst to him, presumably anyway, in Cupertino, California, Steve Jobs was exploring tablets and would soon have Apple into making the iPhone.
It’s a bit hard to remember now but before Apple changed phones forever, a lot of devices were either flip phones or, if you were lucky, a BlackBerry, which had a physical keyboard.
Jobs decided to get into tablets because he “hated this guy at Microsoft,” according to former Apple executive Scott Forstall. The guy was bragging about what Microsoft was doing in tablets and Jobs decided to stick it to him (it must be nice to own a major company when you want to settle a grudge).
Later he realized that he could also make a phone with the same basic ideas and that Apple could just absorb the iPod into the iPhone before someone else went after his big comeback hit (Jobs had been forced out at Apple, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. Later he came back when it was about to go under and the iPod was a huge success that helped ensure Apple’s long-term survival).
But at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, who succeeded founder Bill Gates, ridiculed the iPhone when it came out: who would pay $500.00 for a phone? Who would buy that?
Seven years later, former CEO Ballmer discussed his biggest regret while running Microsoft. You can probably guess what it was. Here he discusses how hard it was to conceive of moving from software to also making hardware and to adapt to the new world Apple had created.
In other words, it was nearly a textbook example of what the elder Christensen had termed disruption (in light of that it’s really interesting to see what Apple’s recent introduction of the M1 line has done to disrupt chip-making: now one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, Apple still managed to disrupt if not upend the computer chip industry).
The videos are pretty funny back-to-back and then in conjunction with the Forstall clip. And the new iPhones top out at $1,400. Think Ballmer owns one?