9 ms·

The problem, really, is this thing called “disruption”

43 points by pencilpup223 9y ago

jasonmaydie 9y ago
This is just the normal lifecycle of the internet or just humans in general. We loved the word disruption a couple of years ago, and now there's a shift to hate it. We loved apps, now we hate them. We loved IoT now nobody talks about it. Deep/Machine learning is all the rage.
rb808 9y ago
I think one thing is disruption the other is unprofitable disruption. Newer better ways of doing things is great. The problem is when Uber & Amazon disrupt the old ways with cheap capital and unprofitable prices. Once the old shops/taxis have died they can raise prices. That isn't fair.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Asking companies to be honest in their copy? Not going to happen.
- hashkb 9y ago
  People who use buzzwords think they are being honest. Or, they look at honesty differently than some others. I think the biggest case of "false advertising" is that anyone has ever been held to account for it.
hashkb 9y ago
Can we stop using all the buzzwords? It will improve synergy.
- leeoniya 9y ago
  webscale, ML cloud synergy?
- gerbilly 9y ago
  >Can we stop using all the buzzwords? It will improve synergy. Can we stop using all the buzzwords going forward? It will improve synergy with our deep learning big data blockchain cloud platforms. FTFY
rajathagasthya 9y ago
Also, "changing the world". Sorry, your messaging app isn't doing that.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  If WhatsApp didn't change the world, what did?
  - abiox 9y ago
    it's neither the first nor the last chat app, i believe - so how would you say the world changed? (note that i don't use whatsapp and am not all that familiar with it. mostly i'm aware of it due to an interest in erlang.)
    - freeone3000 9y ago
      Previously there wasn't a WhatsApp app, and now there is! World changed. :)
    - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
      Over 1 Billion users. According to wiki: According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."[167] Seems pretty world changing in terms of providing a core communication service to 1/7 of the human population
    - RestlessMind 9y ago
      Some ways in which WhatsApp changed the world, based on my first hand experience: - many of my family members, especially in developing world, bought a smartphone solely as a reason to be on WhatsApp. Nothing convinced them before to buy one. Once they had it, they discovered other awesome uses of a smartphone and are part of the "mobile revolution"(TM). That alone should qualify for "changing the world". - no one I know uses SMS anymore (again, developing countries). A great change given the price gouging before (and Americans probably won't understand that if you haven't seen it first hand). - Amount of "support" happening on WhatsApp in the broader economy - (eg. booking a taxi, ordering home delivery from corner grocery store etc - which needed a phone call before and was not as smooth as WhatsApp experience) - hyper-sharing of casual moments in life. I know, I know - there was facebook and picasa and whatnot before that and instagram/snap these days, but amount of photo sharing that happens on WhatsApp is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than what came before or other channels (again, developing countries), simply because WhatsApp made it super simple to share compared to predecessors and is ubiquitous compared to other contemporaries. It should also be noted that WhatsApp needed two big giant shoulders to stand upon: - android and affordable phones (sorry, iPhone simply doesn't cut the deal for the masses) - 2G / 3G spectrum and data connectivity
throwaway2016a 9y ago
Where is the bar for disruption? The timeline they give is "years if not decades" which to me says the bar is really high. But there is such a thing as local disruption which can be a good thing and the bar for that is lower than Earth shattering disruption. While I agree we should stop using this in marketing copy, I think they are useful to use as aspirational internal goals. They give software engineers, designers, and product owners something to aspire to. Which is a good thing.
ggggtez 9y ago
That's not the title of the article at all.
- kyrra 9y ago
  It's been fixed. Original HN title: "Ex Googler says founders need to stop using the word disruption" has been updated to match the article title.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  The sentence comes from the article and summarizes it pretty well.
miguelrochefort 9y ago
Please don't put all companies in the same basket. There's a big difference between Instagram and Google.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. That's a big similarity. I'd even say that they are each others biggest competitor.
  - miguelrochefort 9y ago
    Their business model has NOTHING to do with the legitimacy of a "disruption" claim.
abiox 9y ago
> Ex Googler says founders need to stop using the word disruption i'm a bit unclear on the relevance of 'ex googler'. apparently the author of the wired article was once employed by google, but that doesn't seem germane to the piece. edit: looks like the title was updated.
exelius 9y ago
Disruption is nothing new; it's been happening for millennia. I think the pace of modern disruption is much faster than in the past -- but IMO this has more to do with global population levels. Technology was an enabler here, but really what we've seen is that world population has grown so much that formerly "niche" markets are now quite viable simply based on sheer numbers. A higher number of viable niche markets means more adjacent markets to try to disrupt bigger markets from, leading to a constant cycle of disruption. In many senses, "disruptive" simply means "a greater share of revenue goes to the shareholders". This allows "disruptive" companies to win in price-competitive markets, but it has the side effect of consolidating economic wins in single layer of the economy at a macro level. Advances in capital finance without accompanying advances in worker protections led to this; but again, thanks to the population mentioned above, there's not exactly a worker shortage and thus no pressure for worker protections from the political class.
natch 9y ago
From the article: >These founders who actually have disrupted industries and markets were not grandiose when they started out. They did not appear grandiose from the outside. But the founders were very ambitious. With Newmark as an exception among the mentioned examples.
0xCMP 9y ago
The original brainstorm/paper for Amazon was "the everything store." He started with books and planned to expand in to everything... so yea he actually did set out to disrupt the whole industry. Is it the fact that they don't say what they're thinking? Or that they didn't "honestly think" their companies would disrupt industries?
golemotron 9y ago
The main thing that needs disruption right now is conglomeration.
dalbasal 9y ago
Partly (even mostly), this is a rant about hyperbole and cliche. I'm not sure if this is true, but I've heard title "President" was selected specifically for its understated connotations (as opposed to pomous titles like prime minister). It escalated. A lot of the tech cliches start as understated ways of being hyperpolic. Paradigm a fairly an abstract term. Disrupt is an understated term for revolutionize. But when they reach ciche status, they get annoying. There's an art to understated but ambituous, and an appeal to it. Musk pulls it off at times. I was about to accuse America for this and quote soft words and big sticks, but....that's an americanism ain't it? I dunno. I do think american tolerance for hyperactive positivity is in play somewhere. All that said, disruption deos happens, but is hindsight it usually seems like a technological or societal disruption, not a company led thing. I mean, news has certainly been disrupted.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  If we're talking about how startups and journalists use it, then yes (and since English is what English speaking people speak, then that usage is a definition of the word). But "disrupt" has a technical meaning, and pretty clearly defined by Christensen - a product/service that's worse for the main use of that category, but has other qualities valued by other customers for some other use; over time it improves, and while the category leader also improves it eventually "overshoots" what people need, whereas this new thing becomes acceptable AND it has those other qualities - at that point, it is dramatically replaced by the newcomer, completing the process of "disruption". Seminal example: 8 inch disk drives had (and have) greater capacity; but are bigger and less convenient, and a smaller diskdrive has enough capacity. Same thing happened to 5.25", 3.5", those tiny laptop ones, and now SSD. Same pattern. It's an industry/category event, not a company event... but some companies benefit from it. But it's not very predictive (even thoigh the pattern seems legit in hindsight); Christensen himself famously dismissed the iPhone with about as much aplomb as Cmdrtaco dismissed the iPod. TTBF, while smartphones are disrupting PCs, it's not that absolute; about as much as netbooks did. PCs are still going strong for games, development and business. It was a different story when PCs disrupted workstations.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
jfoutz 9y ago
VC's respond to marketing. Founders use advertising language. Engineers annoyed. Words mean things, but words also have a context. execute means something different to a programmer than it does to a death row inmate. It's nice to imagine a world where there is only one true language that is sufficient for every case, but that's wrong.

43 points by pencilpup223 9y ago

This is just the normal lifecycle of the internet or just humans in general. We loved the word disruption a couple of years ago, and now there's a shift to hate it. We loved apps, now we hate them. We loved IoT now nobody talks about it. Deep/Machine learning is all the rage.

rb808 9y ago

I think one thing is disruption the other is unprofitable disruption. Newer better ways of doing things is great. The problem is when Uber & Amazon disrupt the old ways with cheap capital and unprofitable prices. Once the old shops/taxis have died they can raise prices. That isn't fair.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Asking companies to be honest in their copy? Not going to happen.

hashkb 9y ago
People who use buzzwords think they are being honest. Or, they look at honesty differently than some others. I think the biggest case of "false advertising" is that anyone has ever been held to account for it.

hashkb 9y ago

Can we stop using all the buzzwords? It will improve synergy.

leeoniya 9y ago
webscale, ML cloud synergy?
gerbilly 9y ago
>Can we stop using all the buzzwords? It will improve synergy. Can we stop using all the buzzwords going forward? It will improve synergy with our deep learning big data blockchain cloud platforms. FTFY

rajathagasthya 9y ago

Also, "changing the world". Sorry, your messaging app isn't doing that.

3pt14159 9y ago
If WhatsApp didn't change the world, what did?
- abiox 9y ago
  it's neither the first nor the last chat app, i believe - so how would you say the world changed? (note that i don't use whatsapp and am not all that familiar with it. mostly i'm aware of it due to an interest in erlang.)
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    Previously there wasn't a WhatsApp app, and now there is! World changed. :)
  - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
    Over 1 Billion users. According to wiki: According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."[167] Seems pretty world changing in terms of providing a core communication service to 1/7 of the human population
  - RestlessMind 9y ago
    Some ways in which WhatsApp changed the world, based on my first hand experience: - many of my family members, especially in developing world, bought a smartphone solely as a reason to be on WhatsApp. Nothing convinced them before to buy one. Once they had it, they discovered other awesome uses of a smartphone and are part of the "mobile revolution"(TM). That alone should qualify for "changing the world". - no one I know uses SMS anymore (again, developing countries). A great change given the price gouging before (and Americans probably won't understand that if you haven't seen it first hand). - Amount of "support" happening on WhatsApp in the broader economy - (eg. booking a taxi, ordering home delivery from corner grocery store etc - which needed a phone call before and was not as smooth as WhatsApp experience) - hyper-sharing of casual moments in life. I know, I know - there was facebook and picasa and whatnot before that and instagram/snap these days, but amount of photo sharing that happens on WhatsApp is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than what came before or other channels (again, developing countries), simply because WhatsApp made it super simple to share compared to predecessors and is ubiquitous compared to other contemporaries. It should also be noted that WhatsApp needed two big giant shoulders to stand upon: - android and affordable phones (sorry, iPhone simply doesn't cut the deal for the masses) - 2G / 3G spectrum and data connectivity

throwaway2016a 9y ago

Where is the bar for disruption? The timeline they give is "years if not decades" which to me says the bar is really high. But there is such a thing as local disruption which can be a good thing and the bar for that is lower than Earth shattering disruption. While I agree we should stop using this in marketing copy, I think they are useful to use as aspirational internal goals. They give software engineers, designers, and product owners something to aspire to. Which is a good thing.

ggggtez 9y ago

That's not the title of the article at all.

kyrra 9y ago
It's been fixed. Original HN title: "Ex Googler says founders need to stop using the word disruption" has been updated to match the article title.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
The sentence comes from the article and summarizes it pretty well.

miguelrochefort 9y ago

Please don't put all companies in the same basket. There's a big difference between Instagram and Google.

devmunchies 9y ago
Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. That's a big similarity. I'd even say that they are each others biggest competitor.
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  Their business model has NOTHING to do with the legitimacy of a "disruption" claim.

abiox 9y ago

> Ex Googler says founders need to stop using the word disruption i'm a bit unclear on the relevance of 'ex googler'. apparently the author of the wired article was once employed by google, but that doesn't seem germane to the piece. edit: looks like the title was updated.

exelius 9y ago

Disruption is nothing new; it's been happening for millennia. I think the pace of modern disruption is much faster than in the past -- but IMO this has more to do with global population levels. Technology was an enabler here, but really what we've seen is that world population has grown so much that formerly "niche" markets are now quite viable simply based on sheer numbers. A higher number of viable niche markets means more adjacent markets to try to disrupt bigger markets from, leading to a constant cycle of disruption. In many senses, "disruptive" simply means "a greater share of revenue goes to the shareholders". This allows "disruptive" companies to win in price-competitive markets, but it has the side effect of consolidating economic wins in single layer of the economy at a macro level. Advances in capital finance without accompanying advances in worker protections led to this; but again, thanks to the population mentioned above, there's not exactly a worker shortage and thus no pressure for worker protections from the political class.

natch 9y ago

From the article: >These founders who actually have disrupted industries and markets were not grandiose when they started out. They did not appear grandiose from the outside. But the founders were very ambitious. With Newmark as an exception among the mentioned examples.

0xCMP 9y ago

The original brainstorm/paper for Amazon was "the everything store." He started with books and planned to expand in to everything... so yea he actually did set out to disrupt the whole industry. Is it the fact that they don't say what they're thinking? Or that they didn't "honestly think" their companies would disrupt industries?

golemotron 9y ago

The main thing that needs disruption right now is conglomeration.

dalbasal 9y ago

Partly (even mostly), this is a rant about hyperbole and cliche. I'm not sure if this is true, but I've heard title "President" was selected specifically for its understated connotations (as opposed to pomous titles like prime minister). It escalated. A lot of the tech cliches start as understated ways of being hyperpolic. Paradigm a fairly an abstract term. Disrupt is an understated term for revolutionize. But when they reach ciche status, they get annoying. There's an art to understated but ambituous, and an appeal to it. Musk pulls it off at times. I was about to accuse America for this and quote soft words and big sticks, but....that's an americanism ain't it? I dunno. I do think american tolerance for hyperactive positivity is in play somewhere. All that said, disruption deos happens, but is hindsight it usually seems like a technological or societal disruption, not a company led thing. I mean, news has certainly been disrupted.

hyperpallium 9y ago
If we're talking about how startups and journalists use it, then yes (and since English is what English speaking people speak, then that usage is a definition of the word). But "disrupt" has a technical meaning, and pretty clearly defined by Christensen - a product/service that's worse for the main use of that category, but has other qualities valued by other customers for some other use; over time it improves, and while the category leader also improves it eventually "overshoots" what people need, whereas this new thing becomes acceptable AND it has those other qualities - at that point, it is dramatically replaced by the newcomer, completing the process of "disruption". Seminal example: 8 inch disk drives had (and have) greater capacity; but are bigger and less convenient, and a smaller diskdrive has enough capacity. Same thing happened to 5.25", 3.5", those tiny laptop ones, and now SSD. Same pattern. It's an industry/category event, not a company event... but some companies benefit from it. But it's not very predictive (even thoigh the pattern seems legit in hindsight); Christensen himself famously dismissed the iPhone with about as much aplomb as Cmdrtaco dismissed the iPod. TTBF, while smartphones are disrupting PCs, it's not that absolute; about as much as netbooks did. PCs are still going strong for games, development and business. It was a different story when PCs disrupted workstations.
- dalbasal 9y ago

jfoutz 9y ago

VC's respond to marketing. Founders use advertising language. Engineers annoyed. Words mean things, but words also have a context. execute means something different to a programmer than it does to a death row inmate. It's nice to imagine a world where there is only one true language that is sufficient for every case, but that's wrong.