[raganwald]

Oh but it does. McDonalds once meant cheap and shitty. So did Volkswagon. Japanese automobiles too. PCs were absolutely cheap and shitty. In the early 1980s, there were some powerful financial modelling applications for minicomputers. VisiCalc was cheap and shitty in comparison.

[smacktoward]

The key thing is that none of those were really "cheap and shitty." They were "cheap and good enough," which is different.

Good Enough is a very powerful thing. If you can beat the competition on price while still delivering a Good Enough product, you'll be buried in money.

[ctdonath]

Uh...no. There's lots of cheap and shitty out there, and most of it doesn't survive because that's all it is. McDonalds, Volkswagens, PCs, VisiCalc, etc. all dominated because their "disruptiveness" overwhelmed their "cheap and shitty" - with the latter being applicable because, since nobody had done it before, they didn't really know how to do it any better or didn't have the resources to. Customers took one look at the new product, went "OMG I can't live without it", and bought into it bigtime because the benefits far outweighed the problems. Yeah, VisiCalc was nothing compared to some powerful financial modeling applications for minicomputers - IF you HAD a minicomputer which few could afford and required dedicated personnel for support, as opposed to cheap PCs and cheap software which instantly made spreadsheet software nearly as ubiquitous as spreadsheet paper.

[dasil003]

I'll give you that that's definitely how the incumbents describe the disruptive competition in stage 2 of the standard 5 stages of disruption or whatever.