CONCEPT
New-Market Disruption
The form of disruption that creates a market that did not previously exist by serving non-consumers — people excluded from the incumbent's market by barriers of cost, skill, or access — and whose scale typically dwarfs the market being disrupted.
New-market disruption is the most consequential and least understood form of disruption. It creates a market that did not previously exist by serving non-consumers — people who were not using the incumbent's product at all, not because they were dissatisfied but because they could not access it. The competitor is not the incumbent; the competitor is non-consumption itself. And the market that new-market disruption creates cannot be estimated from the size of the existing market, because the existing market represents only the fraction of potential demand that could clear the barrier to access. The personal computer was a new-market disruption relative to the mainframe. AI is a new-market disruption of vastly larger scale.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The defining historical case is the personal computer's relationship to the mainframe. The mainframe market served a few thousand institutional customers. The personal computer market, which initially served hobbyists and small businesses that could not