Yeah, totally agreed, thanks for the clarification and for your diligence in hearing me out. Generally, I find it most rewarding to reach this kind of mutual agreement as an end-state…provided that we’ve sufficiently worked through the superficial semantic differences in order to establish a shared lexicon for constructive dialogue going forward.

Three cheers for reasoned disputation on interesting and important topics!

Cheers
Chris

http://swissmiss.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/03/10/imagesapple20google20and20you.png

There is no doubt that Christensen believes that moving up market entails increasing architectural interdependency (ie complexity) within a technology. But he is relatively silent on WHERE such increased complexity manifests itself in said technology.

I hope I have established at least the beginnings of an argument that as a technology moves up market, the UI of a technology is less likely to manifest this increased complexity vs other parts of the technology’s architecture. As I said in the original post: “User interfaces tend to increase in complexity much more slowly than the technology behind the interface.”

Agreed?

Okay. First, let me say that I have *not* read the Innovator’s Solution, so my comments are restricted merely to that book. And before I posted my previous comment, it’s true that I did not go back through the Innovator’s Dilemma line-by-line. Perhaps I should have made this more clear.

Nonetheless, from what I can see, the evidence you’ve provided doesn’t really address my comment (although I don’t think you’re “wrong” either). My point from the beginning was intended to highlight that increased complexity *does not necessarily* manifest in the UI or user experience in particular. Instead, this complexity may appear in other ways, which may in fact contribute to their true value, even if the superficial look-and-feel of the product-in-question is, in fact, still quite simple (or even simpler).

One of the passages you quoted is a good illustration of this distinction, and the crux of my argument: “…put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches.” In this quote, the operative word for this discussion is “architecture” — which certainly is not synonymous with, or even fully inclusive of, the “social interface” that you are talking about in your post. I think it’s important to compare like with like, and therefore Clayton Christensen’s work doesn’t seem to apply directly to the kind of arguments you’re developing in your post.

With that said, if you take away the Clayton Christensen straw man, I’m actually in complete agreement with your post, and I found your insight quite interesting. But I do object to the peceived attempt to discredit Dr. Christensen, whose work I respect very much.