"Thou shalt not kill...

[especially] the cash cow."

I can understand why the news media would pay attention to Christensen's disruptive technology (beyond the fact that Christensen's consulting firm serves many in the industry), but it remains unclear to me how the concept is useful to the news media, if at all...

1. While presenting a paper related to disruptive technology this summer, a pro-disruptive technology media scholar commented that the value, or essence of disruptive technology lies in the question of "when" -- i.e., it's not about whether the product based on disruptive technology will take over or not, to which its proponents believe unequivocally the answer to be 'yes,' but when it will take over the existing market in a landslide.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but to me this is precisely where disruptive technology fails because it does not, and cannot predict when it will happen; only that it will happen "someday" and major players in existing markets better be ready when that "someday" arrives. How this is more helpful than, for example, "we better all repent before armageddon comes" is hard to say...

Is it unreasonable to propose that a "when" model is only useful when it actually predicts the "when?"

2. The examples given at the beginning of the article suggests that products based on disruptive technology are likely to replace the precursor; however, there is scant evidence suggesting that the Internet will be 'the' disruptive technology in media. The Internet has brought about sweeping changes in the media landscape since the early 1990s, but all existing media empires are still standing today, and most of them still profit predominately from their traditional products in 2012 (e.g., newspaper, book, music, magazine and movie industries). How much longer must the 'online experiment' on go before media industries recognize that maybe their core value, or 'cash cow,' lies in their traditional product and that this cow may remain healthy and prolific in the foreseeable future?

3. The article suggests that "the disruptive architectures created other important attributes..." (p.45). I agree that the Internet has many internet-specific attributes that appeal to news consumers (e.g., multimedia, immediacy, etc.), but the question is not about how appealing these "disruptive attributes" are, but whether they are "appealing enough" to lead to different viable business models. At least in the newspaper industry, the initial answer seems to be "not appealing enough."