There's a reason I say Sony won't disrupt the market, and that's because they've changed in ways that make that impossible. Actually, Sony is an interesting example of a company which started small, frequently disrupted, grew big, and became disrupted themselves. So is Microsoft. Care to hear the tales?

Back in the 1940s, Sony was a tiny start-up company. They made transistor radios, which radio enthusiasts thought would be a passing fad since their quality was lower than the vacuum-tube based radios of the time. But the transistor radio disrupted the radio market: they were smaller, more affordable, and marketed to everybody instead of just to those who could afford vacuum tube radios. After that, they kept disrupting their own industry, and expanded into others: they introduced cassette players, the Walkman, portable video cameras, and so forth. But the success started getting to their heads around the 1990s. They figured they could take over any market just by changing the way the market worked. Enter the PlayStation (which offered noticeable upgrades over their competitors, but nothing really new beyond hardware improvements), and their slow, sad descent from serial disruptor to market invader and incremental upgrader. And their investors loved it; it meant consistent profits and no more excessive risk-taking. It's doubtful the shareholders would let Sony go back to their old ways, even when their new ways are a sinking ship.

Microsoft, started in the mid-1970s, got their break-through in making a standardized operating system out of one of the many that floated around in the day (Quick and Dirty Operating System, which became DOS). Businesses quickly adopted it, though the computer enthusiasts despised it for its less-than-ideal file system and limited interface. They disrupted the computer industry again with the graphical interface operating system Windows. They introduced the Office suite, giving businesses a single solution package to their workplace needs. But as the 90s hit, again, the company began to change. They started to focus on incremental upgrades to their existing products, and on invading and absorbing markets. Like Sony, they stopped being serial disruptors and started being incremental upgraders.

The lesson in all of this is: don't let your company get too big or too complacent. When you start absorbing markets and just making something better instead of something different, that's a warning sign. It means that you've gone from the proverbial David to the proverbial Goliath, prime for being slain by somebody who manages to make your own ideas look outdated.