Is iSCSI a "disruptive technology"? No, it's not old enough.

After my blog entry on iSCSI, I got a message from Guy Harris:

"You somehow managed to avoid using the word "disruptive" in that entry; was that intentional? :-)"

Guy knows me well. He's one of the first engineers we hired at NetApp, and he's making fun of my obsession with the concept of "disruptive technology" (see The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen). Christensen focuses on what happens when a low-end technology gets increasingly better over time, and eventually attacks a completely different market.

The computer industry is full of examples. UNIX started in the workstation market, but eventually became good enough to compete in the server market against VAXes and mainframes. Windows/Intel started in the business desktop market, but later became good enough to compete against UNIX in the engineering workstation market, and later still in the server market. In each example, the low-end technology started in one market, but eventually became good enough to disrupt a higher-end technology in a different market.

People who haven't read Christensen's book often misunderstand this idea, and simply use the English definition of disruptive: "causing confusion and disorder". A technology is never disruptive when it is first introduced. It either succeeds in some market or it doesn't. It only becomes disruptive later, if it becomes good enough to succeed in a completely different market that has higher requirements than the one where it started.

Why does this difference matter? The point is that a disruptive technology already has a stronghold in its low-end market by the time it starts competing against a new high-end market. Honda's first successful product in the US was a dirt bike. It didn't compete against any existing products. By the time Honda competed against motorcycles (Harley), and later cars (GM, Ford, Chrysler), it already dominated the dirt-bike market which was difficult for those other companies to attack. If Honda had simply competed head-to-head against Harley and GM, starting from scratch, it would have been crushed.

Or imagine if Microsoft and Intel had gone head-to-head against mainframes when they first started shipping. By the time a technology becomes disruptive, it's already had many years of success in its own separate market. It is precisely this track-record of success that makes it so dangerous! The sales channels, the partnerships, the customer relationships that it has developed make it difficult to kill, and give it a platform from which to attack the higher end market.

So is iSCSI a disruptive technology?

I would argue that it isn't old enough to be disruptive. Disruptive technologies already have years of success in a separate market, and iSCSI doesn't have that!

If it turns out that iSCSI and Fibre Channel simply go head-to-head, fighting over the same business from the same customers, then iSCSI is not disruptive. In the plain English meaning, it may be disruptive to Brocade and McData and EMC, but it won't be disruptive in Christensen's sense.

On the other hand, if iSCSI establishes itself as the leader in a separate market - a market for much lower-end networked storage where Fibre Channel just can't compete - then a few years down the road it may have an opportunity to become disruptive.

Only time will tell.