A lot of companies are talking about the importance of being digital, but they miss the point. A very good example of this is Kodak, who didn't get what digital was about for their end-customers.

They offered Photo CD as a digital product, where you got both prints and a CD with images when developing a film. But a few years after the sales of digital cameras took off their revenue took a deep dive. The benefits for the consumers was not digital as such, it was near zero cost of photos and that images were available for viewing at once. With smartphones, they were also shareable at once, which made Kodak obsolete.

Another example is newspapers. As printing cost and distribution were high, you seldom bought more than one paper. With digital, printing costs and distribution went to near zero, and you could easily read articles from different sources, without any extra cost.

Digital is about the possibilities for new customer behaviors, not change from paper as a medium to a digital screen. The big question is how existing corporations can cope with these challenges and innovate their business models.

Disruptive architecture