> the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise
Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.
The original use of "disrupt" was in the sense of, we're going to disrupt these porky record labels and rotten taxi medallion cartels. This got a bad reputation for two reasons.
The first is that the industries being disrupted were the bad guys, but that doesn't mean they liked it. And because they were the bad guys, they couldn't just come out and say "Uber sucks because we don't like having competition". So what they do instead is turn over every rock looking for something to blame them for in the hopes they can get the government to thrash them hard enough to make the market uncompetitive again. Which, of course, damages those companies' reputations, as was the intention.
The second is that a lot of the companies that used to go on about disrupting things are now the incumbents in need of being disrupted, e.g. mobile app stores and big social networks. People look at them as the bad guys because they are, but the problem there is not that disruption is bad, it's that the gander should get what came to the goose.
Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.