Clayton Christensen turned business thinking upside-down in 1997 with his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” where he popularized his term “disruptive technology” in an analysis of the disk drive business. Since then abuse and over-use have rendered the term a meaningless cliche, but the idea behind it is still valid: well-run large companies that pay attention to their customers and make all the right decisions can be defeated in the market by upstarts that emerge from low-end niches with lower-cost, lower performance products.
PicoChip is following Christensen’s script faithfully. First it made a low-cost consumer-oriented chip that performed many of the functions of a cellular base station. Now it has added in some additional base station functions to address the infrastructure market.
Traditional infrastructure makers now face the prospect of residential device economics moving up to the macrocell.
From Rethink Wireless