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BarcampToronto | disruption

Attending BarCampToronto at UofT. First session was on disruption. Speaker (Norm Young) and engineer withWestern Avionics, and with a technology and academic background, spoke of books by Christensen and Raynor.

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The example he used was Linux, but I wanted to relate it to P2P Lending. Using Linux he noted that before it reached the steady state line, its performance was inadequate, and during that disruptive period, he had to work hard to make it work. Now Linux is offerred by Dell, and while its early to call mainstream its getting close.

P2P lending is as Linux was. It requires hard work, and areas of regulation, culture, and acceptance are hurdles, but give it time.

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Second session was Holden talking about an Open Source search engine written in Rails, and the reason I attended was he was talking about scalability, between the application and Amazon EC2. Turns out the scalable aspects were related to limitations with Amazon, and how it takes time to add servers in event of rapid requirements, such as emanating from Slashdot.

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2 thoughts on “BarcampToronto | disruption”

  1. Hi Colin,

    I agree with the potential disruptive aspect of P2P lending. In Christensen’s theory, a good pattern for disruption is:

    1) non-consummer are finally offered a product within their means

    2) low margin customers are satisfied by this new good enough alternative and progressively switch to adopt it

    3) incumbents are happy to let the low margin customers go one after one and concentrate on ever higher margins

    While P2P lending is clearly satisfying criterium 1, we still have to understand how far criteria 2 will be fulfilled. At least, we are clearly heading for an interesting journey.

  2. Thanks Frederic …. 2) should be helped by demographic shifts, which indicate that more than 50% of the working population will be ‘net gen’ by 2010.

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