7 ms·
Stop "Disrupting" Everything
- mathattack 13y agoI agree completely. Sometimes it's possible to great things without attacking an existing market from the bottom.
- wmf 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499
- davmre 13y agoAh, thanks. Apparently the HN dupe detector doesn't know that 'slate.com' and 'www.slate.com' are the same site. :-)
- charlesism 13y agoWasn't there a post here last year entitled: "Let's Disrupt Waiting Rooms"? The average doctor's waiting room has plenty of room for improvement, but using "Disrupt" in that context is a little hyperbolic.
- agilebyte 13y agoYes, improve, just do not do it like my GP. Now all (sick) people have to click through a touch screen upon their arrival for an appointment...
- devanti 13y agoand stop "hacking" everything
- possibilistic 13y agoNever. You're missing the point of what it is to be a hacker.
- tarr11 13y agoI think OP means this: https://www.google.com/search?q=top+10+hacks https://www.google.com/search?q=top+10+hacks
- Sae5waip 13y agoMaking lots of money with web applications, apparently (or trying to, anyway). Real hacking is non-commercial.
- meowface 13y agoYou're right. The term itself isn't bad, but it's misused very frequently.
- RokStdy 13y agoFrom the article: "...What makes disruptive innovations so deadly is they’re not better than your product. They’re worse. Anyone who needed a mainframe at the dawn of the personal computer era would find a PC to be an incredibly lame and underpowered alternative..." I particularly like the statement above. I think the PC example is a good one, and then smartphones/tablets did the same thing to PCs.
- Charos 13y agoAbsolutely true. A tablet isn't as capable as a PC is, yet. Trying to do my taxes on my Nexus 7 would be a nightmare. But it satisfies a very good use case: a cheap, portable device for casual computing and media consumption. The only fundamental thing standing in the way of tablets completely eclipsing PCs is the input method. If we can get a good replacement for the keyboard/mouse on a touchscreen device, the days of traditional PCs could be numbered.
- PeterisP 13y agoIf you're talking specifically tablets, then you won't get any extra input methods - when a tablet is used, your hands are in a position that only the touchsceen can be used effectively and your other appendages are not that useful for input. So either we figure out how to make touchscreen+voice to work effectively for content creation, or we'll have to use something other than a tablet experience for that.
- bcoates 13y agoStylus. 6000+ year old invention for increasing positional and pressure control on touch-sensitive tablets. The hardware is there already, but the stylus-optimized software is thin in the ground.
- jarrett 13y agoYou're right about input. But I doubt a touchscreen will ever suffice for a lot of professional work. For graphics and CAD work, I need the precision of a mouse cursor. My laptop's trackpad works great, and my mouse works even better. My fingertip on a screen, by contrast, will always feel clumsy in comparison. Fingers are just too fat. The only way they become not too fat is with a gigantic screen. But then that's not really a tablet. And gigantic screens can be ergonomically bad, because they force you to bend your neck looking at them. Likewise, for serious typing, I need the tactile response of a keyboard. Touch-typing on a touchscreen is frustrating. Of course, there's no reason you can't attach a mouse and keyboard to a tablet. But then you basically have a laptop that doesn't fold closed. It's hard to consider that a uniquely tablet-esque experience.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pertinhower 13y agoMan that is one game-changing article. It has convinced me to downsize my use of business cliches, going forward. It plucks the low hanging fruit. It has totally shifted my paradigm, acted as the tipping point for my disdain of faddish phrases.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWhat's with all the buzzwords? That's not out of the box thinking!
- Domenic_S 13y agoBoy, this comment really resonates.
- jrockway 13y agoI only have one ask: and that's that you also use the word "synergy".
- jonahx 13y agoI also appreciated how the author made his ideas dead-simple, and how his sentences were lovingly hand-crafted.
- thearn4 13y ago<twitch>
- Fomite 13y agoWords I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from common use: "Disrupt", "Hack", "Stakeholders"
- cylinder 13y agoNor would I, but I also wouldn't mind seeing Slate and The Atlantic vanish from the internet.
- gavinlynch 13y ago"space" is also a great adjunct next to "disrupt" that needs to be destroyed. How about I "disrupt" the "space" next to your "face". !
- toomuchtodo 13y agoMinor quibble: I think stakeholders is a fairly important word, albeit overused. I have company X. I want to describe something that matters to the founders, the shareholders, the employees, and the clients. All of these people are stakeholders. In the greater sense, stakeholders refers to the people affected by what you're doing, and isn't that what we're all doing every day? Ask yourself: What am I doing today, and for whom? Everyone is a stakeholder in something. </soapbox>
- TeMPOraL 13y agoSo instead of "stakeholders" let's just say "people who care" (about X).
- bostonpete 13y agoI agree. This idea is double plus good.
- Fomite 13y agoOr, and stay with me for this one, define who those people are. ;)
- michalu 13y ago
- richforrester 13y agoThis will keep happening. The same way parallax sites were hip for a while. The same way everyone turned to flat UI, or how we made "painting x" with CSS alone. And thanks to these patterns, every now and then, we get an awesome HN Parody site. What a wonderful herd.
- Jugurtha 13y agoA-frigging-men ! One has only to look at the Hacker News feed. It's packed with new start-ups "disrupting" everything. I launch Thunderbird and go "Here's yet another 'disruptor' hiring". Or "Let's revolutionize X". Come on (insert three exclamation points here). The only thing this is disrupting is the power of that word. It got diluted, like every buzz word. And now everything is bleeding edge, disruptive, fantastic, agile and "beautiful". Rainbows, and unicorns, and butterflies ! Oh, my!
- EpicEng 13y agoAgreed. Whenever is see yet another HN link along the lines of "X is hiring, come help us disrupt Y!" I subconsciously read "come join our ill-conceived startup which is almost guaranteed to fail within a year!" It's cliche and I wouldn't even bother looking at such an add.
- princess3000 13y agoSounds like you're not the epic rockstar ninja they're looking for anyway.
- anigbrowl 13y agoYou forgot pirate.
- 13y ago
- alan_cx 13y agoCould we HNers declare war on cliché? Oh...... "war on". Doh!!!! I'll get me coat...
- mman 13y agoStop "Stop Xing" everything
- jff 13y ago"Let's disrupt the homeless problem by offering free HTML classes in shelters!" (I have seen basically this exact sentence posted here)
- fleitz 13y agoHomelessness isn't a problem, it's an industry solution to leverage from labour.
- Jugurtha 13y agoThis is hilarious ! Somebody had just seen "The Pursuit of HappYness" and took it to the next level. Let's offer "Hot Soup Processor" classes for free and will have homeless people coming in thinking there's hot soup in there.. And that wouldn't be as bad as HTML classes. At least there's "hot soup" in the name. As Zed Shaw would put it: "Incentive, motherfucker. Do you speak it !".
- theandrewbailey 13y agoWhenever I hear the word "disrupt", I despair.
- radley 13y ago1. Typical link bait by Slate. 2. Site unreadable / unscalable on Galaxy S4.
- Jugurtha 13y agoEvery time I see this, I imagine the guy being like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4