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• Innovation is Exhausting & the Fate of Disruptors in Australian Accounting Software

Disruptions are good for the consumers and sometimes good for the economy. Disruptions are not good for old businesses stuck in their old ways.

Businesses fear disruptions. The new disruptors themselves will start preventing or slowing down new disruptions.

Here’s the deal:

The word Disruption is a temporary replacement for the word Revolution. Probably, due to overuse and over-politicisation.

Disruption is the fast accelerator of change in our lives, economies and businesses. Sometimes evolutionary methodology is too slow or too lazy. We need disruption.

Reason one. Naturally, all physical bodies are seeking calmness. Perpetuum motion is an impossible concept. Every pendulum eventually will stop.

Humans seek stability. Businesses do as well. Businesses that disrupt eventually would be creating additional barriers to entry for their industry.

Disruptors themselves would want to kill any revolution at its roots. Seeking stability for themselves.

If you think about this:

For how many years did we have to pay hundreds of dollars every year to upgrade MYOB and get only the new icons design and updated tax tables?

No disruption, no revolution, no evolution. Business is in the most comfortable and stable position.

But here’s the kicker:

However, businesses are not existing in isolation. They are revolving in an economy, constantly interacting with other businesses and industries. New disruptors are entering the market every month.

The obese legacy market share of MYOB is unable to lift itself into the cloud. Why would it even want to? It is comfortable where it is.

Innovation is exhausting, isn't it? Sure, disruptions are good for consumers. Or so they think.

And:

Reason two. Partially integrating into the current system is the only way for the disruptors to be successful. No company can reach greatness in isolation.

Every disruptor will have to pay their “thirty pieces of silver” of some sort of hybridization with the current system. They will hide this shameful did. So we would expect less and less innovation from current successful disruptors.

Xero is denying blockchain and bitcoin. I can only speculate why: their banking partners don’t want them to accelerate disruption that is happening in their industry. No Bank Feeds, no Xero.

Mastercard and Visa also shitting themselves as cryptocurrencies are slowly making them useless and outdated. Would it be unreasonable to assume that they would be putting pressure on everything they get in touch with, to slow cryptocurrencies? Survival of the fastest is getting new meaning now.

Now get this:

Reason three. It is so easy to introduce new ways when you are building something new. Within few years any disruptor develops legacy systems, processes, and habits. It takes much more time to play turn existing machine in the new director.

Artificial Intelligence relies on clean data to produce reliable and stable results. The first introduction of AI this year just took the biggest dump into Small Business books, transactions are allocated left right and center.

The legacy of Small Business Bookkeeping/Accounting: small businesses are very bad at doing it themselves. AI absorbed it very fast and reproduced the results accordingly.

Want to know the best part?

The hope is out there. Quickbooks sold their legacy desktop corpse to Australian company Recon for later cannibalisation. Their new product QBO is building its revolution on outdated and very demanding American soil. Still struggling with very slow cloud adoption in the conservative US.

This is crazy:

At the end of the day, if you want to be the fastest, you just need to slow everyone around you.

And this is why old disruptors of Australian accounting software pose no real help to small business owners.

If we are to expect a new revolution, it is not going to come from the current players.

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