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Comment by Mendenhall | Hacker News Reader

I dont see this as "disruption", they wisely competed in a space with a huge mark-up on product cost. Something like this wouldnt work on an already lean industry.

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This is actually the textbook example of "disruption" as described in The Innovator's Solution. The generally accepted definition of disruption is capturing a market from an incumbent by introducing a product that meets most of a customer's needs at a much lower price and/or higher availability.

The beauty is that the big players are structurally unable to compete, because they have baked in a high cost structure and are dedicated to serving ever-higher customer needs (think five blades).

Thanks for that definition and its context, I was unfamiliar with it even though I have seen the used often. I viewed it perhaps in a more old school way of simply exploiting their weakness of those baked in costs. Your definition helps me understand more now how the term is used,I appreciate that.

One problem is that people often misuse the term "disruption" to mean different things.

We consider companies like Facebook or Twitter to be tech companies because tech is their differentiator even though they're really social media companies. In this vein, DSC is a marketing company. They are really good at convincing people to buy their razors which are totally normal razors that you can actually buy elsewhere.

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