Most new technologies, in fact, are sustaining. By extension, not every new market entrant, even one riding on new technology, is a disrupter. I began to wonder whether most of Lucent's new customers weren't players in the old value space. It serves the same markets as telephony-classic. Furthermore, telcos immediately recognized that Internet telephony was relevant.
Martin lists five major disrupters - optics, silicon, wireless, packets and software.
The Internet was not on his list, except by inference. Under IP, the network becomes the transport component of an application, much like the disk drive becomes its storage component. It feels discomforting, disloyal and threatening to consider a disruption of our own incumbency. I recently did my will. I had a problem imagining a world in which I didn't exist.