A "Kuhnian revolutions" doesn't need to be a wholesale replacement of assumptions underlying an entire field of inquiry. Sure, most of the examples he used in h

A "Kuhnian revolutions" doesn't need to be a wholesale replacement of assumptions underlying an entire field of inquiry. Sure, most of the examples he used in his original book were drawn from such large-scale paradigm shifts. But especially in his later writing, Kuhn seems to focus more on what we might call "micro-revolutions": paradigm shifts that affect only a small part of the relevant science or technology, but which work in much the same way as large-scale scientific revolutions. Of course this isn't the only interpretation out there, and philosophers of science can disagree among themselves all day long. But much of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge research that took place after Kuhn's book followed this broader interpretation, and studied small-scale changes in very narrow sub-fields of science as well as larger ones. In other words, Kuhnian revolutions aren't as rare and far between as his original book might seem to suggest. New concepts in IT might not "completely supplant" their predecessors, but their rise to prominence can certainly be called revolutions in the area(s) that are irreversibly changed by them. For example, very few people nowadays think that APIs on the Internet should be anything other than RESTful. Previous paradigms for remote computing protocols have been almost completely supplanted in this area. Likewise, table-based HTML layouts have been completely supplanted by CSS in the last 10 years. The change, of course, was motivated by the previous paradigm's inadequacy in addressing the needs of the evolving Web. There are lots of examples like this, even trivial ones, that can nevertheless be called miniature Kuhnian revolutions.