There is an interesting article over the Anti-Marketer blog analyzing whether Starbucks is disrupting or being disrupted. Quoting the article:

“At the time when Starbucks began, the big coffee suppliers had enormously overshot the needs of their customers for a cheap, fast cup of coffee. Yet, each “innovation” they introduced kept on making the product either cheaper or faster to prepare, stripping the product of the original reasons we became addicted to it – its flavor first and foremost, but also its ability to facilitate social interaction, savor a great meal, sit and relax, etc.

So Starbucks was a disruptive innovator. It brought flavor, a friendly social setting, quality, plus the consistency that only a chain can do. They brought back the smells, the sensuality, and introduced to Americans a “European experience” — and, what Schultz has described as the sense of theater.”

Starbucks was a disruptor, but apparently it is not protecting itself against future disruptive innovations that might erode its own business:

“And, more importantly, they’ve overshot the needs of their customers, and are ripe for disruption. To speed up coffee service in order to sell everything else too, they installed automatic machines. Automatic machines can be more consistent, especially for inexperienced operators, but they also reduce the flavor and the authenticity of the experience, and show competitors how they too can produce a cup just as good as Starbucks (i.e. open themselves to commoditization).”

You can read the whole article here.

There is a very interesting and thought-provoking interview with Michael Raynor over Guy Kawasaki’s blog. The first question is “Why did Windows kick Macintosh’s butt?”, and here is what Raynor answered:

“Apple continued along the path that it had blazed with the Apple II and the Macintosh: very cool, very high-performing products built around a proprietary architecture of hardware-software integration. This was a perfectly reasonable bet to continue, but it happened to be the wrong one in the personal computer market of the late 1980’s. Like a broken clock, a strategy that never changes gets it right sometimes, though statistically it is wrong more often than not. The iPod is Apple’s latest hit, and it’s more of the same: a cool device built around a proprietary architecture. Apple’s clock hasn’t changed; it still reads twelve o’clock. It’s just that it happens to be noon again.

By contrast, Microsoft built a series of strategic options that positioned the company for success under a variety of different outcomes. Microsoft had what turned out to be a better strategy only because it didn’t commit itself to a single strategy. For example, when IBM began aggressively creating a competitor to MS-DOS and Windows, OS/2, Microsoft collaborated with IBM. The Windows development effort is evidence of Microsoft’s belief in GUI OS’s, but Microsoft was also getting a foothold in applications development for GUI-based systems by writing Excel and Word for…Apple! Corporate customers seemed to think that UNIX had a promising future, and so Microsoft was investing in UNIX too even as it released new versions of the by-then venerable menu-driven MS-DOS.”

You can read the whole interview here.

JVC, for instance, agreed to license out its technology to a vast array of electronic manufacturers including Hitachi, RCA and Panasonic. Sony, on the other hand, tried to keep its Betamax technology strictly proprietary.

JVC also compromised on the recording quality so that a single tape would be able to record a whole football game. Sony was so obsessed with its state-of-the-art technology (Betamax was undoubtedly superior to the VHS) that they refused to reduce the recording quality in favor of longer recording sessions.

All those factors certainly helped JVC, but there is arguably another one, more obscure, that influenced the final result: the porn industry went with the VHS format. The early home video rental stores were responsible for part of Betamax’s decline, and those stores carried a lot of pornographic content.

The question then becomes: will the adult movie industry play an equally important role on the format war between Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD?

It is not clear yet, but should the answer turn out to be “Yes” Sony will need a lot of lucky to avoid losing again. Most of pornographic movie producers, in fact, are going with the Toshiba HD-DVD format after Sony refused to give Blu-Ray licenses to porn movies.

Do you think the porn industry will influence the result of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD format war?

Considering all the buzz that the iPhone generated we can assume that it will disrupt the mobile phone industry and make Apple hit the jackpot again, can’t we? Well, I would not be so secure about that. While I admire Steve Jobs’ initiative to invade a challenging business such as the mobile phone one, I think that Apple’s strategy has some flaws, and below I will outline each of them:

1. The mobile phone market is not the digital music one: Apple did something unbelievable with the iPod, redefining a whole industry (the digital music one) and placing its MP3 players in hands of more than 70 million people. No wonder they are so confident about exporting the iPod success into new segments. When Apple entered the digital music segment in 2001, however, there were no dominant players and the segment was relatively immature. Most of the people purchasing an iPod had no prior experience with MP3 players, meaning that Apple only had to convince them about buying the product (and not about ditching an existing one). The mobile phone industry represents quite a different situation, where virtually every single person already has a phone, sometimes with complex subscriber plans on the background.

2. Competition will be fierce: do you remember Diamond Multimedia or Sensory Science? Probably not, but those were the companies producing the first MP3 players, and they were also the competition Apple faced when it decided to enter the digital music industry. The iPhone, on the other hand, will face competition from the likes of Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. Those players do not only have deep pockets, but they are also among the most innovative and design-oriented companies in the world.

3. Apple’s user experience will be affected by Cingular’s user experience: analyze Apple’s history and you will see that its success was always derived from the ability to integrate hardware, software and services. Such integration enabled Apple to create an incredible user experience, like in the Mac-iPod-iTunes combo. The iPhone, however, will enter the market through Cingular, meaning that the service part of the equation will no longer be under Apple’s control. This will reduce Apple’s flexibility and it will also force customers to interact with Cingular, which is not as hassle-free as using an iPod, you can bet.

4. The touch screen might not be suitable: are we sure that a 3,5 inch touch screen is suitable for a mobile phone? If you consider how the average person uses a mobile phone you will see that the object must be somewhat resistant to shocks and scratches, after all it is constantly being handled, getting inside and outside of pockets and bags and sometimes even falling to the ground. Apple already had trouble some time ago when customers who bought the iPod Nano started complaining about how easily the screen got scratched.

5. Lack of a keyboard: whether you like it or not most people use the mobile phone to make calls and to send SMS (Short Text Message). Sometimes you need to make those calls on the run, while walking or driving, and the last thing you would need is to be forced to look at the mobile phone as you dial.

6. The $500-$600 price tag is conflicting with the demand: the iPhone does have a sleek design, a user-friendly interface and a strong orientation towards the entertainment dimension. Those characteristics will certainly make the device appealing for young people. That customer segment, however, is not the segment that spends $600 for a mobile phone. If you take a look at the phones from the four major US wireless carrier operators you will realize that there is no single product selling above $500, and in 2006 the percentage of phones that were sold for more than $300 account for less than 5% of the market.

7. Lack of 3G support: the OS X software coupled with the other features included on the iPhone will enable people to use a myriad of Internet application, bringing mobile connectivity to another level. Well, at least in theory, because in practice Apple will need to solve some issues related to wireless networks. The iPhone will work with 2.5G EDGE networks and not with the 3G UMTS and HSDPA as the latest mobile phones. EDGE networks can carry data up to 340 kbits/s while current UMTS handsets have a bandwidth of 3,6 Mbit/s.

8. Battery life: battery life is an important issue for mobile phones. Apple stated that the iPhone will have up to 5 hours of talk/video/browsing. However, there is no disclosed specification for standby time, nor any real-life performance data confirming those numbers. The large number of features included on the iPhone is making some people wonder whether the battery will have enough autonomy for a day-to-day usage.

9. Lock-in strategy: the iPhone was developed under a lock-in perspective. Should you buy music on the iTunes it will come with the FairPlay copy protection (even the music industry is starting to understand the drawbacks of strict DRM). Secondly, unlike with the Treo or other smartphones, you will not be able to touch the software of the device. Lastly, the iPhone is also locked to Cingular’s wireless network, meaning that consumers will not be able to switch to another carrier.

10. Apple will need to live up to the expectations: Apple stated that they want to sell 10 million iPhones in the 2008 fiscal year. That is not an unrealistic number considered that mobile phone manufacturers are expected to ship almost 1 billion units in 2007. Should they fail to reach that goal, however, it will become a huge disappointment. Just for the sake of comparison, Research in Motion sold 5,5 million Blackberries over the past 12 months, and people call them Crackberries…