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Jonathan Gardner at Health Affairs links to a lot of debate over these things. I don’t debate, I use them, but it’s interesting to see what people have to say — especially Clayton Christensen, who gives an in-depth interview in the actual magazine Health Affairs (free online until May 22).
The personal computer is a disruptive innovation — compared to the mainframe, it’s incredibly cheap and easy for a nonexpert to use. “When I was first out of school,” says Christensen, “if I needed a computer, I had to take my punch cards to the corporate mainframe center and give them to an expert there who ran the job for me. Because computing was so expensive and required so much skill, we just didn’t compute very often.” The disruption in this case was the encoding of that expertise into personal computers — but, of course, for most of us it has been anything but a disruption.
