Google It by Newton Lee

Author:Newton Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer New York, New York, NY

11.8 The Business Context of Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha came along at a key time for what employees then called Wolfram Research. At that point, the conglomerate was clearly one company and had long sold one flagship product, Mathematica , a comprehensive platform for technical computing. Originating about 20 years before W|A, the product made a huge splash, offering new heights in symbolic mathematics, function visualization, and interactive technical document creation. In the next 20 years, growth in the company was synonymous with growth in this product, which holds a comfortable niche with competitors Matlab and Maple . It was not cheap, but you got what you payed for, backed by a dedicated group of mathematicians and computer scientists bent on integrating as much technical computing as they could into a single unified language and experience.

With such a mature product, one has to be very vigilant for competitors, particularly the ones that might initially be described as inferior. Clayton Christensen’s popular theory of disruptive innovation [1, 2] posits that many products are undermined not by superior competitors, but inferior competitors that serve customers in a different way. First, when an inferior competing product is launched, the company with the superior one does not worry too much, as very few users of the new product would buy the superior product anyway. Often, the inferior product has no real competition in its submarket. Slowly, the inferior product improves, taking progressively larger shares of the overall market, but at no time does it make sense for the superior product’s company to make a cheaper offering, as its own higher-margin users would buy the lower margin product, eating away at that company’s own profits worse than by its competitors. Eventually, the competing product can become good enough that whatever new need it was created to fill (say a program to run on mobile devices instead of desktop programs, or a disk drive smaller in physical size) will tip the overall balance of features would tip to the competitor, leaving the once-superior product’s company to be playing catch-up in a new technological substrate. Often, there is little sign that such a disruption is taking place until it has occurred, making the theory critical to recognizing potential trouble.

Mathematica was starting to show signs of being a candidate for disruption. University students often preferred scientific calculators to software programs, given their feasibility for individual classroom use and their not requiring any additional hardware except batteries. The Internet and open-source licenses meant that special-purpose university-written languages such as GAP were viable alternatives for mathematicians in particular fields. Perhaps most daunting of all, open-source general-purpose languages, such as Python , with easily extended library systems were starting to sprout numerical and symbolic computing extensions, such as numPy , that were nowhere near as powerful as Mathematica but were practical for some applications and continually gaining in capability. The capabilities of Mathematica over-served the needs of these products’ users.

In the Wolfram group’s business landscape, Wolfram|Alpha functions as a disruptor to potential disruptors. The Internet could now generally be assumed, and smartphone technology was progressively widespread.

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