The silent war for the noisy market of ubiquitous computing

Why it is vital to know which companies will corner the “everyware” industry, the ultimate business that will change all of our personal, professional, and commercial interactions

There are some books that belong to a rarely recognized, yet very popular, category called “the books that everyone loves to quote but very few have actually read.” The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), by Clayton Christensen, would easily secure a lifelong place on the Top 10 if this was an actual list. For starters, The Economist called it one of the six (?) most important business books ever written, which means people felt compelled to read it — or, at least, to pretend they did. Secondly, and don’t tell anyone I said that, although it’s truly interesting, the book is a little boring. Sorry, it is, nothing I can do about it. And, finally, Christensen’s publisher kind of cyberpunked the book’s cases with that oversold subtitle (“When new technologies cause great firms to fail”), an artifice that rarely ends well, whether in 1997 or in 2077.

But the real reason why The Innovator’s Dilemma is better to quote than to read is much simpler. The book is packed with finely crafted quotable sentences like this one: “It is simply impossible to predict with any useful degree of precision how disruptive products will be used or how large their markets will be.” It is not necessarily true, but no one seems to care — especially if it fits that academic paper or product presentation of yours.

It sounds bulletproof, I admit, but it’s a phrase that doesn’t hold for long. Sometimes — a lot of times — you do can predict the potential size of a “disruptive industry,” and, depending on the context, it may be an effortless prediction to make. Best contemporary example: the ubiquitous computing market.

For those unfamiliar with the nutty habit of talking to speakers around the house — as in “Alexa, can you access Clubhouse?” — ubiquitous computing is the desktop computing where everything is the “desktop.” It’s an interaction with an omnipresent operating system that can be accessed from any device (even when you don’t realize there’s one), across multiple interfaces (even when…