1) Hard drive industry was the main example cited in Innovator's Dilemma.
2) Various posts pooh-pooh'ing this development (including the current top post) here are committing the classic mistake described in that book made by incumbents which leads to disruption by new entrants to the market.
3) Seagate is doing something right. It doesn't guarantee that they'll win the next phase of the storage battle but they are doing something radically different which has a plausible marketing story appealing to a large base.
The problem is, this isn't innovation. NASD did the same thing better fourteen years ago. Disruption could still occur if somebody would evolve those ideas in a way that makes it suit users' needs better, but AFAICT Seagate is doing the exact opposite. It's difference for the sake of difference, "disrupting" only their own business.
Jeff, if you look at my linkedin profile, you might notice that I have some background with object storage systems. I'm not familiar with any incarnation of NASD or a similar system that was sold as individual disks accessible over IP.
If they do end up selling it as individual disks directly pluggable into standard racks (with some easy means of supplying power), this certainly would count as a potentially disruptive innovation. As I said before, whether market reacts positively or not is not certain, but it never is. But kudos to Seagate for trying it.
You're right that NASD never became a standalone product, but at least the design was technically complete enough to be the basis for real systems (e.g. Panasas).
A technology is only disruptive if it provides some benefit over existing alternatives. Will Kinetic be cheaper than today's drives paired with tiny ARM servers (the storage-industry disruption that is already upon us)? We won't know until Seagate actually sets prices and tries to sell some, but it doesn't seem particularly likely. Will it be faster? Again, possible but not particularly likely. Will it allow higher density and/or lower power consumption? Will it be easier to build applications on top of this new and limited API than on top of the ones we already have? Without a credible positive answer to any of these questions, how is this disruptive?
If Seagate had done this right, especially wrt security and semantics beyond get/put, this might be a better building block for a whole system. That might be disruptive. But they've made such a poor start technically that if they make a dent at all it might well be someone else who achieves the actual market breakthrough. Once Seagate has done all of the marketing, that makes it far easier for someone with a better actual implementation to succeed. Look forward to the WD/HGST Object Drive, with an API that allows you to use one securely without a server to do read-modify-write and metadata management for you. Then I'll cheer.
2) Various posts pooh-pooh'ing this development (including the current top post) here are committing the classic mistake described in that book made by incumbents which leads to disruption by new entrants to the market.
3) Seagate is doing something right. It doesn't guarantee that they'll win the next phase of the storage battle but they are doing something radically different which has a plausible marketing story appealing to a large base.