The problem, really, is this thing called “disruption”

Disruption is nothing new; it's been happening for millennia. I think the pace of modern disruption is much faster than in the past -- but IMO this has more to do with global population levels. Technology was an enabler here, but really what we've seen is that world population has grown so much that formerly "niche" markets are now quite viable simply based on sheer numbers. A higher number of viable niche markets means more adjacent markets to try to disrupt bigger markets from, leading to a constant cycle of disruption.

In many senses, "disruptive" simply means "a greater share of revenue goes to the shareholders". This allows "disruptive" companies to win in price-competitive markets, but it has the side effect of consolidating economic wins in single layer of the economy at a macro level. Advances in capital finance without accompanying advances in worker protections led to this; but again, thanks to the population mentioned above, there's not exactly a worker shortage and thus no pressure for worker protections from the political class.

Partly (even mostly), this is a rant about hyperbole and cliche.

I'm not sure if this is true, but I've heard title "President" was selected specifically for its understated connotations (as opposed to pomous titles like prime minister). It escalated.

A lot of the tech cliches start as understated ways of being hyperpolic. Paradigm a fairly an abstract term. Disrupt is an understated term for revolutionize. But when they reach ciche status, they get annoying.

There's an art to understated but ambituous, and an appeal to it. Musk pulls it off at times.

I was about to accuse America for this and quote soft words and big sticks, but....that's an americanism ain't it? I dunno. I do think american tolerance for hyperactive positivity is in play somewhere.

All that said, disruption deos happens, but is hindsight it usually seems like a technological or societal disruption, not a company led thing. I mean, news has certainly been disrupted.

Also, "changing the world". Sorry, your messaging app isn't doing that.

I think one thing is disruption the other is unprofitable disruption. Newer better ways of doing things is great. The problem is when Uber & Amazon disrupt the old ways with cheap capital and unprofitable prices. Once the old shops/taxis have died they can raise prices. That isn't fair.

Asking companies to be honest in their copy? Not going to happen.

This is just the normal lifecycle of the internet or just humans in general. We loved the word disruption a couple of years ago, and now there's a shift to hate it. We loved apps, now we hate them. We loved IoT now nobody talks about it. Deep/Machine learning is all the rage.

The original brainstorm/paper for Amazon was "the everything store." He started with books and planned to expand in to everything... so yea he actually did set out to disrupt the whole industry.

Is it the fact that they don't say what they're thinking? Or that they didn't "honestly think" their companies would disrupt industries?

VC's respond to marketing. Founders use advertising language. Engineers annoyed.

Words mean things, but words also have a context. execute means something different to a programmer than it does to a death row inmate. It's nice to imagine a world where there is only one true language that is sufficient for every case, but that's wrong.

> Ex Googler says founders need to stop using the word disruption

i'm a bit unclear on the relevance of 'ex googler'. apparently the author of the wired article was once employed by google, but that doesn't seem germane to the piece.

edit: looks like the title was updated.

Where is the bar for disruption? The timeline they give is "years if not decades" which to me says the bar is really high. But there is such a thing as local disruption which can be a good thing and the bar for that is lower than Earth shattering disruption.

While I agree we should stop using this in marketing copy, I think they are useful to use as aspirational internal goals.

They give software engineers, designers, and product owners something to aspire to. Which is a good thing.

From the article:

>These founders who actually have disrupted industries and markets were not grandiose when they started out.

They did not appear grandiose from the outside. But the founders were very ambitious. With Newmark as an exception among the mentioned examples.

The main thing that needs disruption right now is conglomeration.

Can we stop using all the buzzwords? It will improve synergy.

That's not the title of the article at all.

Please don't put all companies in the same basket.

There's a big difference between Instagram and Google.