"Disruption" gets a lot of abuse. As it was originally proliferated in reference to tech ventures, it referred to a very specific pattern highlighted by Clay C

"Disruption" gets a lot of abuse. As it was originally proliferated in reference to tech ventures, it referred to a very specific pattern highlighted by Clay Christensen's writings out of HBS. In classical "disruption," a product or technology that is notionally "worse," but as a result greatly cheaper or more easily distributed, takes over a market from notionally "better" but more expensive legacy approach. Often includes de-skilling of the use case too. It's sort of like guerilla warfare in that way. The successful recent IPOs people are pointing to in this comment section -- like Zoom, Datadog, and Cloudflare -- all tend to have a version of this classical disruption if you try and see it. I say this not for mere pedantry but because taking "disruptive" to mean "F---ing things up (rules, laws, etc.)" dilutes a useful concept in thinking about technology adoption approaches.