The outsourcing gurus have been driving the theory, and they are saying everybody ought always to do this. But it is really contingent on where you are on the spectrum from "not good enough" to "more than good enough," relative to each tier of the market.

If you ask the average guy on the street to name five companies that have truly transformed themselves over the few decades, Hewlett-Packard would be on everybody's list. You'd also put on this list GE and Johnson & Johnson.

Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.

Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.

Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea, but everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now.