Is Steve Jobs Disrupting Again with Apple's Showtime? Run the Disruption ScoreCard to Decide

Consumer electronics and media pundits are lining up to predict what Apple CEO Steve Jobs has in mind for his next big thing, presumably a marriage of TV and PCs. Apple is hosting media and technology people Tuesday in San Francisco with the tagline, "It's showtime."

"A more intriguing possibility discussed by former Apple engineers and on rumor sites like AppleInsider.com is that Apple may use wireless technologies like WiFi and ultra-wideband to stream digital content from a Macintosh to the TV."

Om Malik speculates the deal could be:

• Showtime, its movie download/streaming service
• New devices/iPods optimized for video
• New Macbook Pros
• All of the above
• Jobs decides to buy Sun, then eclipse it ;-)

Clearly there are also some implied questions: Will Apple unveil a 'cool' device and will Apple disrupt another market the way it did with the iPod and earlier with the Mac?

I wouldn't actually know anything about cool. And I have no idea how to create a culture or a repeatable pattern of creating cool devices. Steven Jobs is a serial disruptor/genius. But for most companies, trying to create something cool is a good way to neglect business fundamentals and to kill a company.

Think about Microsoft TV, which was ranked one of Microsoft's top 10 blunders... because it was a feat of engineering but it didn't fit with what users actually do when they watch TV.  Same for the Media Center PC.

But I do have a sense of some of the right questions to ask Tuesday to assess whether Apple's new  product is potentially disruptive, culled from our Disruption ScoreCard:

• Is Apple pursuing marginal customers otherwise ignored by the mainstream?
• Do competitors underestimate the product as a 'toy' or deficient?
• Are customers overjoyed by what it does?
• Does it solve a problem that customers are already trying to solve but can't do conveniently or easily themselves?
• Simple purpose? Easy to use?
• Performance improving?
• New business model?

You can use the Disruption ScoreCard to rate Apple's innovation. (More tools for managing disruption.)

** Other Views **
Wired has some speculative pictures of future iPods.

Apple's 1984 Macintosh TV commercial still resonates with a disruptive marketing campaign to showcase a disruptive innovation, the first easy-to-use computer.

 Harvard Prof. Clayton Christensen takes a harsh view of Apple in this BusinessWeek interview, warning the company will head back to obscurity unless it changes its integrated approach: "If they don't open up the architecture and begin trying to be the iTunes inside all MP3 players, they're going to have to keep coming up with the next cool thing...I think it will allow them to survive for a little bit longer (in the PC market.)

Full archive of On Disruption columns published in the Financial Post.

Remember Apple's Newton?  It was a $350-million flop in the PDA market, and a highlight from the wilderness years (for investors at least) from 1987-1997. Some insights on why Newton failed.

Author Andy Hertzfeld, one of the early Mac designers, explains Why the Mac was a success.