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Stop “Disrupting” Everything
- MisterBastahrd 14y agoTo a degree, he makes a valid point. Take the news industry. It most certainly is not any better at delivering informed content to users. Does it deliver content faster? Sure. Is it easier to get to it? Absolutely. But the natural constraints of the print editorial cycle forced journalists to wait before spraying us all with their breathless commentary. It used to be that editors were tasked with getting things right. Now they're just tasked with getting things out the door quickly so that they can maximize online ad revenue.
- stackedmidgets 14y agoThey're not actually 'maximizing ad revenue.' They're usually trying to maximize pageviews. Understanding that distinction seems to be beyond a lot of the online media business these days.
- lost_name 14y agoI agree with the sentiment that not everything has to be disruptive to be successful, and it might even be important to distinguish between the two for your own mental stability (a modesty check, if you will), but I don't think it matters in the end to the industry. The concept of disruptive technology doesn't go away because the term is overused, and the brilliance of innovation doesn't depend on the accuracy of the terms used to define it.
- jeremyjh 14y agoBut disruptive inventions are not necessarily brilliant. Modesty should have nothing to do with it. Certainly the iPhone can be brilliant without being disruptive.
- msandford 14y agoWhen dealing with software it's rarely the case that worse-is-better, more often it's better-is-better. Worse-is-better only comes up when the stuff already out there is very well done, polished, and too expensive for most people to afford.
- _delirium 14y agoSoftware is the original worse-is-better domain: Richard P. Gabriel coined the term to describe competition between software packages.
- msandford 14y agoYou're right of course, when dealing with desktop software packages. I was only thinking of the online web-startup stuff which is generally just plain better.
- lost_name 14y agoYou are technically correct and I probably used too strong of a term to describe what I meant there. I only mean to say that labeling something as disruptive doesn't mean it is and vice versa.
- twoodfin 14y agoAt least as I've heard John Gruber tell it, Christensen at first thought the iPhone wouldn't be disruptive because he saw it (as did most) as high-end phone, targeted at high-end users. What it really was, he later realized, was a small, cheap computer. Now iPhone-style smartphones outsell PCs.
- rhizome 14y agothe sentiment that not everything has to be disruptive to be successful this is seriously amateur framing.
- brandon_wirtz 14y agoDisrupt has always been a strange name for the conference since almost every startup showing there has been a clone of another larger more popular startup. I have literally had conversations with founders there that went, "So tell me how you are different from Facebook," "Well we built our entire platform on node so it is infinitely scalable" "Is that a problem with Facebook now? That it doesn't scale?" "Well no, but we also re-imagined the interface" "It looks like facebook, if Facebook was done in Twitter Bootstrap" "That's exactly Right!" "Did users ask for that?" "Well No, but we also added support for sharing code snippets" "That's interesting, so it is really a Facebook for Developer communities" "Well No..." "Do you think most people's mom and 4th grade english teacher want to see the code snippets in your timeline?" "We don't really have a timeline, everything shared happens in realtime like the front page of hacker news" "So if my friends want to see the pictures I took last week of my trip to Belize they can't see them?" If you want to be disruptive you have to do something truly new. Something that will change the way everyone else does things. You also have to be prepared for all the knock-offs that might have better marketing, or better connections, so you should also have a bit of something no one can duplicate in your core. The Disrupt conference has always been a showing of MVP's and betas that aren't even an MVP. But disruption occurs when you have something that is more than an MVP it is a Product no one can live without afterwards.
- gottagetmac 14y agoThat's not the definition of "disrupt" used by Christensen (or by Yglesias in this article). Yglesias is arguing that we should return to the useful definition of disrupt as developing a product that is worse in most respects compared to existing products, except on price (and possibly size/portability). The quality you're talking about is something like "revolutionary," not disruptive.
- DigitalJack 14y agoI really wouldn't have thought that "disrupt" meant cheap and shitty.
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- spoiledtechie 14y agoIm NOT disrupting anything. I am Pioneering something! I am trail blazing. I am the one not following the pack. I am the one going in the opposite direction.
- minimaxir 14y agoIf you're going in the opposite direction, doesn't that mean you're going backwards?
- mturmon 14y agoThat's the kind of one-dimensional thinking we're trying to disrupt.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThat's the kind of disruptive thinking we're trying to disrupt. With disruption.
- r00fus 14y agoBackwards and forwards are relative terms. And one-dimensional. Sometimes by going only forward, you might simply hit a local maxima.
- pyre 14y agoIt can be both. For example, if you find a better way to run a 'newspaper,' then you're disrupting an existing industry, but you could also be trailblazing in the way that you approach it (i.e. a way that no one as ever tried before).
- squozzer 14y agoRegardless of how our projects and lives play out, the term has become over-used. The comparison to "synergy" I would improve by comparing it instead to either "extreme" (for you older folks) or (Xenu forbid) "random".
- erikpukinskis 14y agoThe drama around words like this is between people who don't actually use the concepts they represent. The words "disrupt", "synergy", and "cloud" are useful words ONLY if: - You care about the high level strategies a startup might implement in order to take on an entrenched player who is playing a game no one can beat them at. - You are seeking mutually beneficial intra-business relationships. - You would like to provision machines without managing them yourself. Journalists and non-practitioners fight back and forth about words like this because they have no skin in the game. I will continue happily using the word "disrupt" because I read the Innovator's Dilemma and I think Christensen highlighted a powerful concept that needed a label. And I will continue using the word "cloud" because I remember what it was like to have to buy a dedicated server every time I wanted to spin up a new service. And I could give a rat's ass if some journalist thinks that's hokem.
- danmaz74 14y ago> Journalists and non-practitioners fight back and forth about words like this because they have no skin in the game Actually I think that the real problem is with unscrupulous marketing from practitioners than with journalists and non-practitioners. When a word becomes a trend, everybody wants in, so the word is stretched so much that it loses its original usefulness. Take cloud for example - what does it really mean today? Even the usual old VPS today is marketed as a "cloud" solution...
- venomsnake 14y agoCloud has never had meaning. I always thought that fog was the much more appropriate weather event for the vague concept that all the different people tried to push.
- bcoates 14y agoCloud is a VPS plus a decently real-time API for provisioning and configuration, so I can treat servers as an abstract software component. Pre-cloud era VPSes often required humans in the loop for simple administrative tasks.
- vacri 14y ago
- asperous 14y agoI always thought people shouted the "Help us Disrupt" thing because they want people to shift to them because they are 'better' than the evil mega-corps and 'have the best interest of their users at heart' instead of, you know, actually having a better offering at a lower cost.
- amkassim 14y agoIn general I find Ygleasis's articles to be overrated. i.e. don't really add any value.
- andrewtbham 14y agoI disagree with all the examples that aren't disruptive, google, online dating, and Uber. People forget how crude and limited they were to begin with.
- andrewtbham 14y agoI would really like to know why this was downvoted.
- bjterry 14y agoProbably because your statement didn't include any rationale for your disagreement, and specifically didn't address his direct claim, which is that each of these was better than the alternative at their genesis. In disruption as described by Christensen, a market is being overserved by an incumbent relative to the needs of buyers, and the disruptor offers a somewhat worse product at a dramatically lower price, not a BETTER product. Google was superior to Yahoo along every dimension. Uber was a dramatically better experience than a taxi, and was also MORE EXPENSIVE.
- andrewtbham 14y agogood point. uber and online dating both lacked the network to be superior initially. it's hard to say what industry search engines disrupted... (libraries, yellow pages, encyclopedias, travel agents?) but in 1998 when google was founded, they indexed 26 million pages. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.h... Here is the original google: http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-google-server-looked-like/ http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-google-serv... Regarding the statement Google was always superior to yahoo... it would be nice to have a timeframe, because Google provided Yahoo's results as late as 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search My point is that the author is a mainstream adopter and is comparing the mainstream products to their counterparts that they disrupted.
- bwang8 14y agoIf using a word, such as "disruptive", will give you a small gain in marketing advantage, or the lack of will give you a disadvantage, then people will always spam/abuse it until it becomes a meaningless buzzword, or until investor grew earwax to protect themselves from it, or until it is perceived that anyone uses this word is most likely BSing. Then people are going to adapt away from using such a word. Most people probably understand that their stuff isn't the next facebook, but they will try everything to get the last bit of investor attention.
- dasil003 14y agoThere must be one of those standard quippy hacker "laws" about the usefulness of new conceptual term being directly correlated to the rate that it will be diluted into meaninglessness in the hands of progressively declining foodchain of marketing goons.
- smacktoward 14y agoHow about this: once your term has a conference dedicated to it, it has crossed the line from useful term to useless marketing buzzword.
- benologist 14y agoIt'd be nice if startups in general took a step back and toned stuff down. Be ambitious and optimistic without pretending your website and the guy who's going to tweak it are solving Very Hard Problems, changing the world and of course disrupting whatever multi-billion dollar industry. Those startups are the exception not the rule, if you're the only one saying it you're not really doing it.
- dasil003 14y agoTwo thoughts: a lot of startups probably are low key, but you don't hear about them on the media circuit for obvious reasons; also, the process of raising money has a tendency to spiral into hyperbole.
- jsonne 14y agoI don't disagree with what you're saying, but startups are hard. There's lots of ups and downs and getting people to buy into a vision of the world is a lot more comforting when you're working long days and weekends than thinking "gee I love slight iterations for profitable/quick exits". So while I agree with you, I understand why people do it.
- zobzu 14y agoOf course its a buzzword.It's the new "innovation". When it'll wear out another one will come up.
- saraid216 14y agoPretty sure we're still buzzing "innovation".
- saraid216 14y agoI'd be pretty happy if people stopped using the phrase "ripe for disruption".
- xnxn 14y agoIf enough people agree, does that make the phrase autological...?
- michaelochurch 14y ago"Disruption" rhetoric reminds me of those clerics in the Middle East who preach peace and forgiveness in English and war and vengeance in their native tongue in the same speech. Founders who give a shit about TechCrunch want to be corporate. (There are many founders who don't, and I'm not talking about them.) They want in the club. They use "disruption" rhetoric to inspire 22-year-old engineers to work 90-hour-weeks, but what they really want is to join what they feint against on stage, and they profit immensely from the sale of young, clueless talent ($5 million per head acq-hires where those engineers themselves are lucky to get $47) is their way of getting there.
- xradionut 14y agoDon't "disrupt" everything, start fixing shit that's broken.
- rhizome 14y agoLike companies like TechCrunch who co-opt words like "disrupt" for their flaccid marketing purposes? The world of TC is the world of wannabes. If there's one thing TC always wanted for itself but as a section of the peanut gallery they could never have, is an ability to "disrupt" anything. Obviously they needed to turn that inferiority boat into dollars, with Arrington as cartographer for the sailing map.
- logicallee 14y agowhen I use the word "disrupt" it means forget market prices and market mechanisms, because we are "disrupting" this market. example startup: "We found 1000 tons of diamonds and have a wholesale buyer. we'd like to dig it up." market mechamism: whole diamond price, mining equipment price, purchase orders ,etc. example "disruptive" startp: "We found a way to pull diamonds out of thin air without paying anything for them. As we no longer need any wholesaler our route to market is direct to consumer at 100x volume. we are the mcdonald's of diamonds." See the difference? One is the existing mechanism. The other is something new.
- hughw 14y agoFair enough. That's not how the term is used in The Innovator's Dilemma, though.
- equilibrium 14y agoI think the kind of disruption the author is referring to is Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" or Schumpeter's gale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
- disruptu 14y agoJust replace "disrupt" with "steal". Then decide if you're ok with being a part of that redistribution.
- rektide 14y agoUbicomp has been hating on disruption for over a decade.
- dirkgently 14y ago"hating on" is another such, er, phrase that I hate.
- rektide 14y ago"decrying the anathema of" then, you oldschooler not-at-all-hipster you
- planetmcd 14y agoIsn't slate disrupting the use of disrupt?
- unclebucknasty 14y agoFunny, I was just today thinking about the overuse of another word: "hacker", after seeing another job posting here for a programmer, but using that word. It's been abused so much that I am not even sure what it means any more. But, when I read the job descriptions, there's generally nothing beyond a standard programmer that is being sought. If every programmer is now supposedly a hacker, then what's the point of the word? Smells more like companies just trying to sound cool, which of course has the opposite effect and is annoying to boot.
- unclebucknasty 14y agoThe fact that we are encouraged to celebrate disruption and people are even using the term in their branding is testament to the dearth of true innovation. So many startups are busy trying to one-up existing products and services, but relatively few seem to be trying to create new products/services/markets.