From: Nathan Myhrvold Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2014 3:43 PM To: jeffrey E. Subject: FW: Innovation article in the new yorker From: Nathan M=hrvold Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2014 8:41 AM To: Bill Gates ( ; Larry Cohe ;=Casey Tegreene; 'Lowell Wood'; Edward Jung; • Cam =yhrvold cky Wood; Yuki Ishikawa; Peter Detkin; Gre= Gorder; Adriane Brown; Russ Stein; David Kris; Scott Heimendinger; Chris Alliegro; Maurizio Vecchione Subject: Innovation article in the new yorker In 1997 Clayton Christensen came out with a book cal=ed the "The Innovator's Dilemma". It told a compel=ing story of how new technology could be disruptive to existing markets an= competitors. The book became wildly popular within the tech industry. Everybody wanted their new technology to be vie=ed as "disruptive", and advocates started seeing "disrup=ive" threats everywhere. At Microsoft there was a consta=t stream of discussion about which projects were disruptive and which were not, or which companies were going to disrupt us, and who we could disrupt= In the years since 1997 this book and the vocabulary it intro=uced have been part of the holy writ of Silicon Valley. At the time I thought that the book had some value, =ut was dismayed at the extremes to which it was adopted. This sort o= business book is rarely what science would call a theory — i.e. som=thing with predictive value. Instead they tend to provide some nouns and verbs that one could use as a language to discus= a situation or company. The difference is crucial - an after =he fact the story isn't much use to guiding decisions. T=e stock and trade of most business theorists is that they tell very compelling stories which then tempt people into using them like =heories — to guide decisions. Indeed that is why people buys b=siness books, and pay speaking fees to the author. A vocabular= for story telling isn't the same as a predictive theory.=/p> Here is an illustration of the difference that happe=ed to me in Af