CONCEPT
Non-Consumption
The largest untapped market for any product — the population excluded from consumption entirely by barriers of cost, skill, access, or infrastructure — and the market that new-market disruption creates by eliminating those barriers.
Non-consumption is the population that does not use the incumbent's product at all — not because they are dissatisfied but because they cannot access it. They face barriers of cost, skill, infrastructure, or geography that place the incumbent's product beyond reach. For most products in most markets, the non-consumption population is larger than the consumption population, often by orders of magnitude. Christensen's framework identifies non-consumption as the largest and most consequential market opportunity in any technological transition, because the disruptor that can serve non-consumers faces no incumbent competition and creates demand rather than redistributing it. Applied to AI, non-consumption explains why the developer in Lagos matters more than the developer in San Francisco for understanding what comes next.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The approximately forty-seven million professional developers worldwide represent the existing software development market. The population of people with ideas and no programming skills — the non-consumers of professional software development — numbers in the billions. The new market that
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