

Stop "Disrupting" Everything - davmre
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html

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RokStdy
From 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
Absolutely 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
If 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
Stylus. 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.

------
jff
"Let's disrupt the homeless problem by offering free HTML classes in
shelters!"

(I have seen basically this exact sentence posted here)

~~~
fleitz
Homelessness isn't a problem, it's an industry solution to leverage from
labour.

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Fomite
Words I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from common use: "Disrupt", "Hack",
"Stakeholders"

~~~
toomuchtodo
Minor 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
So instead of "stakeholders" let's just say "people who care" (about X).

~~~
bostonpete
I agree. This idea is double plus good.

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alan_cx
Could we HNers declare war on cliché?

Oh...... "war on". Doh!!!!

I'll get me coat...

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charlesism
Wasn'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
Yes, 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...

------
wmf
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499)

~~~
davmre
Ah, thanks. Apparently the HN dupe detector doesn't know that 'slate.com' and
'www.slate.com' are the same site. :-)

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devanti
and stop "hacking" everything

~~~
possibilistic
Never.

You're missing the point of what it is to be a _hacker_.

~~~
Sae5waip
Making lots of money with web applications, apparently (or trying to, anyway).

 _Real_ hacking is non-commercial.

~~~
meowface
You're right. The term itself isn't bad, but it's misused very frequently.

------
richforrester
This 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.

------
radley
1\. Typical link bait by Slate.

2\. Site unreadable / unscalable on Galaxy S4.

------
Jugurtha
A-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
Agreed. 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
Sounds like you're not the epic rockstar ninja they're looking for anyway.

~~~
anigbrowl
You forgot pirate.

~~~
amorphid
What language do coding pirate's use for statistical analysis? Rrrrrrrrrrr.

~~~
Jugurtha
I use MATLAB .. I guess I'll settle for the Royal Navy, then. My dream to be
Jack Sparrow and have an excuse to be constantly drunk and awesome has just
been shattered.

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mathattack
I agree completely. Sometimes it's possible to great things without attacking
an existing market from the bottom.

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theandrewbailey
Whenever I hear the word "disrupt", I despair.

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mman
Stop "Stop Xing" everything

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Jugurtha
Every 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)

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pertinhower
Man 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.

~~~
jonahx
I also appreciated how the author made his ideas dead-simple, and how his
sentences were lovingly hand-crafted.

