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…