The Undead of Languishing Tech
Zombies, Vampires, Frankenstein… no, it’s not horror movie night; these undead lurk around inefficient markets– unvanquished.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
In Clayton Christensen’s bestselling book The Innovator’s Dilemma, he talks about two types of companies: Sustaining Companies, who are the incumbent market leaders, and Disrupting Companies, the upstart entrants who threaten to destabilize or destroy the Sustaining Companies if they beat them on innovation and reach the mainstream market.
A memorable example is Blockbuster’s crumbling in the wake of Netflix’s meteoric rise as a result of their failure to take seriously trends in digital and streaming technology; compare this to Apple’s willingness to cannibalize its own business (i.e. iPhones ate the iPod) in order to innovate and create new markets.
I believe there’s a third category: Languishing Technology.
Languishing Technology pervades markets that are large but slow-to-innovate due to limited incentives for efficiency and high costs for risk and change. Languishing Tech is riddled with technical debt across an improbably fractured market landscape. There are no market leaders— only a sea of undead.
Do you recognize these creatures from your local City Hall?
Zombies: These are the companies you look at and say, “How are they still alive?” The product runs on something like mainframe COBOL and is maintained by one (1) dude in the basement who makes everyone nervous when he mentions retirement. Zombies are often hyper-regional entities— you see a lot of them in one state and nowhere else on the planet. None of their customers have a single nice thing to say about them— they’ve just been there so long and… it’s fine, I guess.
Vampires: Often market leaders in another industry, for another customer, with a solution for another use case, but they’re happy to ramrod a vaguely tangential technology for a modest configuration cost of twenty-million dollars or so. They’ll bleed your agency dry, if you’re not careful. After a five-year, seven-figure “implementation” period, their solution will be just half-baked enough when their contract comes up for renewal— and really, what’s a few more million at this point? The solution will be “finished” just in time for them to stop supporting this version.
Frankenstein: The closest thing to a market leader in an inefficient market, these monstrosities grow via aggressive acquisition. They bolt on Zombies left and right— their market “strategy” is stitching together inorganic revenue line-items while cost-cutting with chainsaw precision. Frankensteins can grow big, but never strong, because all that ill-fitting tape and glue will barely hold. Do all those awkwardly bundled solutions even talk to each other? Unlikely. Frankensteins can even transform an unmotivated Zombie customer into a disgruntled detractor.
These Languishing Technologies plague public agencies charged with performing critical social functions in domains of government, public safety, education, and public health. This army of undead makes these markets seem pretty unappealing, but they’re actually ripe for winner-takes-all Disruptive Technologies— one really good solution could handily slay 147 languishing ones. Steve Case makes a similar argument in The Third Wave— the Public Sector is poised for transformation and offers an ocean of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Languishing Technologies often represent outdated categories of technology with so much accumulated technical debt that their dilemma isn’t so much whether or not to innovate, but just how to stay relevant with decades-old tech limitations. If new entrants can redefine the category with a solution good enough to carve out an early niche, their agility will allow them to reach and conquer the mainstream market faster than the undead can rebuild.
