
Stop “Disrupting” Everything - jamesbritt
http://slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html
======
brandon_wirtz
Disrupt 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
That'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
I really wouldn't have thought that "disrupt" meant cheap and shitty.

~~~
raganwald
Oh but it does. McDonalds once meant cheap and shitty. So did Volkswagon.
Japanese automobiles too. PCs were absolutely cheap and shitty. In the early
1980s, there were some powerful financial modelling applications for
minicomputers. VisiCalc was cheap and shitty in comparison.

~~~
smacktoward
The key thing is that none of those were really "cheap and shitty." They were
"cheap and _good enough_ ," which is different.

Good Enough is a very powerful thing. If you can beat the competition on price
while still delivering a Good Enough product, you'll be buried in money.

------
erikpukinskis
The 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
> 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...

~~~
wisty
> Take cloud for example - what does it really mean today?

I think it's a fancy word for "on the net".

~~~
danmaz74
It's what it has become - but originally it meant what now has become SaaS (eg
gmail)

------
MisterBastahrd
To 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
They'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.

------
benologist
It'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.

~~~
jsonne
I 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.

------
lost_name
I 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
But disruptive inventions are not necessarily brilliant. Modesty should have
nothing to do with it. Certainly the iPhone can be brilliant without being
disruptive.

~~~
msandford
When 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
Software is the _original_ worse-is-better domain: Richard P. Gabriel coined
the term to describe competition between software packages.

~~~
msandford
You'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.

------
equilibrium
I 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>

------
bwang8
If 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
There 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
How about this: once your term has a conference dedicated to it, it has
crossed the line from useful term to useless marketing buzzword.

------
asperous
I 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.

------
xradionut
Don't "disrupt" everything, start fixing shit that's broken.

~~~
rhizome
Like 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.

------
andrewtbham
I 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
I would really like to know why this was downvoted.

~~~
bjterry
Probably 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
good 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.h...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html)

Here is the original google: [http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-
original-google-serv...](http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-
google-server-looked-like/)

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>

My point is that the author is a mainstream adopter and is comparing the
mainstream products to their counterparts that they disrupted.

------
michaelochurch
"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.

------
zobzu
Of course its a buzzword.It's the new "innovation". When it'll wear out
another one will come up.

~~~
saraid216
Pretty sure we're still buzzing "innovation".

------
amkassim
In general I find Ygleasis's articles to be overrated. i.e. don't really add
any value.

------
rektide
Ubicomp has been hating on disruption for over a decade.

~~~
dirkgently
"hating on" is another such, er, phrase that I hate.

~~~
rektide
"decrying the anathema of" then, you oldschooler not-at-all-hipster you

------
spoiledtechie
Im 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
If you're going in the opposite direction, doesn't that mean you're going
backwards?

~~~
mturmon
That's the kind of one-dimensional thinking we're trying to disrupt.

~~~
sliverstorm
That's the kind of disruptive thinking _we're_ trying to disrupt. With
disruption.

------
planetmcd
Isn't slate disrupting the use of disrupt?

------
disruptu
Just replace "disrupt" with "steal". Then decide if you're ok with being a
part of that redistribution.

------
unclebucknasty
Funny, 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
The 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.

------
saraid216
I'd be pretty happy if people stopped using the phrase "ripe for disruption".

~~~
xnxn
If enough people agree, does that make the phrase autological...?

------
squozzer
Regardless 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".

------
logicallee
when 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
Fair enough. That's not how the term is used in The Innovator's Dilemma,
though.

