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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

How can someone write a whole article about disruption but not actually use the correct, well understood meaning of the term? They literally just made up their own strawman definition of what "disruption" means (tech people getting rich I guess?).

Disruption has always been used to mean disrupting established market leaders via innovation. Guess what? That's exactly what has happened with Uber, AirBnB, Amazon...

If anyone wants to learn more about the actual meaning of disruption, I suggest The Innovator's Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

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> Uber, AirBnB, Amazon

Amazon, sure, but Uber & AirBnB? Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?

Uber disrupted taxi companies.

AirBnB disrupted the hotel industry.

Both used technology to get there (there were no apps to hail taxis anywhere near feature parity with Uber for instance). They also leveraged the distribution mechanisms of the app store to reach scale.

> Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?

Whether you view it that way or not (I don't) it doesn't change the fact that these companies successfully disrupted established players. It doesn't matter if it was "innovative" (again I think it was), the end result was textbook disruption.

Uber and airbnb outcompeted them by offering lower prices and disregarded obviously outdated laws. The phone was what actually disrupted the industry not the actual services.

> disregarded obviously outdated laws

That's disruption?

Not in its technical sense but if you want to understand what they did its important to take into account as it obviously worked.

Airbnb in particular benefited from the existence of other technology they didn't directly employ, mostly related to smartphones: ubiquitous cameras for hosts to take pictures, reliable taxi service from Uber and its rivals making more areas viable for tourists, high quality mapping apps to let people see what neighborhoods are fun and convenient.

Cellphones in general mean hosts don't have to provide TVs, landline phones, alarm clocks, paper maps, newspapers, etc. that were traditionally in hotel rooms.

>before regulation leveled the field again

Before regulation locked out any possibility of long term successful competition.

If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition that is playing by the rules, it may be a sign that your business is not sustainable.

> If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition that is playing by the rules

I read this three times before I understood what you were saying. At first I read it as "If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition, that is playing by the rules" as if to justify breaking the rules. English is a lovingly ambiguous language sometimes.

Or just that the rules are stupid, and/or bought and paid for by the incumbent businesses. I have no sympathy for taxi medallion owners or the entire system of graft that caused it to arise. Basically everybody wants to pull the ladder up after them once they get to the top.

>Before regulation locked out any possibility of long term successful competition

from companies willing to exploit loopholes in hard won labour laws whilst putting the health of the general public in danger by exploiting the slow moving mechanism of governance for profit

I think the "disruption" thesis presented in the wired article is perfectly reasonable. Clayton Christensen has his own theory of disruption too as you point out in reference to his book. The wired article is reviewing books that analyze disruption in terms of the broader social/legal context vs Christensen who focuses on disruption in terms of a company and the market. Both are valid.

The author cycled through several ways it gets used, and it IS used differently in different contexts by different people, and that matters. Your appeal to a platonic usage is unconvincing.

Anyway this isn't a "whole article about disruption", it's an article about three books that reframe Silicon Valley's history.

"An Alternative History" would suggest that the actual history would be mentioned somewhere in the article. The Innovator's Dilemma book doesn't even get a mention.

It's totally fine to have a contrarian point of view but you have to accurately represent the opposing view point. That wasn't done here.

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