Tech *IS* The Real Disruptor, Because As With Ideas, Tech Is Hard To Kill

This image has reached meme level 10 over the last few months. While it's great navel gazing material for Silicon Valley players, and even aspirational for those (such as myself) who believe in the promise of customer-centric service design, there's a ton of baloney buried between those above lines.

The hotel industry did not kill themselves via "limited availability and pricing options."

Hotels base their expansion strategy via projected vs. actual usage studies in a wide range of areas (cities, near large venues or airports, in tourist attractions) and price ranges vary by both supply & demand and the particular brand in play. It's a similar formula that leads to supermarkets ending up in more populated, affluent areas while food deserts appear in less populated and/or poor neighborhoods.

Individual Airbnb listings are successful or not based on the exact same availability/price model; the only difference in actualizing a space is the overhead investment. Airbnb's platform exposed this opportunity to serve consumer gaps that hotels simply couldn't

No one "died."

The retail industry died because of bad customer service?

Does avoiding the collection of sales tax—which led to an early-stage foundational customer base overnight and expedited Amazon's deep coffers—actually equate with "good customer service?" For customers who want to get over on providing revenue to their city or state, sure, but the loophole that Amazon's compliance team maneuvered through took place 100% because of technology.

Jeff Bezos is a master innovator, investing within the company to a ridiculous degree in order to long-game the entire industry with logistics plays that would make Fiorello H La Guardia blush. But how do these moves substantiate this charge that Ma & Pa's Five & Dime, or even the average department store, had such poor customer service that they enabled Amazon's rise?

That brush is far too broad to apply, and it's comparing apples to oranges. Prime is a tech platform, and nothing in the brick and mortar world could ever compete with its customer service tenants and ability to deliver at scale. There's no "blame" to pass around—Amazon simply got ahead of the curve and never looked back.

The music industry did what?

45s have been around since just after the end of WWII (that's World War Two, millennials). As kids of the 80s, we primarily bought full length albums because that was the art form of popular music, but we also valued the A/B sides of 45s when we wanted to "taste test" an artist.

Apple made music much easier to buy, and then simultaneously took away the rights of the buyer by locking us into DRM. So on the one hand, Apple changed the music game (for the better or not is still a highly subjective debate) by pumping up the importance of tracks over albums, but on the other hand they throttled the culture of sharing music with friends by participating in big-label collusion by developing their... wait for it... DRM technology!

Congratulations, Apple! I haven't purchased tracks through iTunes for more than a decade now. When I do buy, I do so through Amazon because they offer the consumer friendly option to own their own non-DRM tracks.

The taxi industry has been ripe for iterative improvement for forever and a day

But Uber's disruption happened by circumventing labor laws and regulations with a business model that provides minimal value for drivers. I mean, seriously, the "gig worker?" That's about as believable of a notion as a trip to a Karaoke Escort Club is about the desire to sing in public.

Uber made a brilliant move to couple mobile & GPS technologies with a slickly produced narrative that sold the false premise that anyone can make ends meet on their "down time." The results of such an approach has led to an influx of high-turnover workers who fill Uber's coffers while demanding zero benefits for doing so.

Yes, taxis are over-regulated, and yes, they had forever to figure out how to do it all better. That's undeniably true, but laying blame to fare controls? Unless I have absolutely zero options available to me, you won't ever see me catching an Uber in a surge zone. Uber's pricing model is more smoke and mirrors than discount via disruption.

Blockbuster sucked; all hail Netflix!

Let's run a thought experiment for a minute.

Imagine that Netflix entered the game as a brick-and-mortar business. Do you honestly believe they could've changed the industry-wide practice of charging late fees if they didn't leverage technology?

The reason Netflix was able to move away from that model upon establishing their door-to-door delivery service is because of the expectation that service created with customers. In the early 2000s, I would schedule my two movies per week around the quick delivery / quick watch / quick return participatory experience. If I didn't get to packing up a disc and sending it off, I knew the consequence would be that I didn't get to watch my next regularly scheduled film.

Could Blockbuster have done the same with their physical inventory? Probably not. Similar to Amazon, Netflix has an advantage with their centralized distribution centers. A late return of one, ten, or 100 different DVDs wouldn't make a dent in their revenue stream, which is why they skipped over charging late fees to essentially cutting off customer access in a way that resonated with their customers.

While the old model of physical rentals and late fees was terrible, it was a huge shift in incentivization and technology that served as the transitional bridge to streaming video on demand.

Scale is what changes the game

I do agree with the meme that being customer-centric is key to the success of retail business. But without scaling technology to reach an exponentially larger customer base, to lower prices, to create customer service benefits never dreamed before, etc. industry-shifting innovation is beyond hard to materialize.

Let's not kid ourselves.