I have been fascinated by Harvard’s Clayton Christenson work on Disruptive Innovation. One of the premises of his work is that a new technology can garner huge market share when it competes against non-consumption, or it suddenly makes it possible for people who couldn’t afford technology to do something equally well. Well, this is a business technology blog and I have been looking at the penetration of desktop Linux in Africa i.e. desktop Linux as a disruptive innovation for Windows.
Linux really fits the disruptive innovation bill clearly on both counts but there is a huge saboteur to it becoming THE desktop OS of choice on most desktops to people who can’t afford to spend $1000 on a PC (See my other blog on how I arrive at this figure). That saboteur is piracy. First, because of the sheer number of other people using it on desktops around the world – Windows is the natural tendency for most people (besides the fact that most new laptops come with Windows pre-installed) – now if it were not affordable by any other means, these people would then have no choice but to love and use desktop Linux and unless Microsoft can find away to make Windows equally free – most of the developing world would end up with Linux.
That is not going to happen as long as piracy enables these people to obtain almost any commercial software for as low as $2. It is for this reason that desktop linux hasn’t grown as much as one would expect from the Disruption models especially in the developing world. So ….. how do we remove this limitation? – Food for thought.
