⟨ " Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens them. Why?
We argue that the tech giants have learned how to coopt disruption.
They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they redirect its people and assets to their own innovation needs.
These seemingly unrelated behaviors work together to enable the tech giants to maintain their dominance in the face of disruptive innovations. " ⟩
In addition to the tactics noted in the paper, the manner in which incumbents use standards development organizations and industry consortia to slow-roll anything that disrupts their existing product lines, and try to re-direct anything disruptive to something that they can (barely) incrementally implement is something that is not appreciated enough!
