Comment by Pamar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pamar | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with most of the article, and I will try to incorporate some of the concepts in my future discussions with colleagues and external consultant.

I do have some problems with this, though:

In practise we never end up walking the design tree forever. Residue from our past mistakes (the dotted nodes) lingers in the codebase and makes it ever harder for us to walk around the design tree. Eventually, fresh competitors will be able to do it quicker and take our users.

I mean, is this really the case? Maybe it is if you work with smartphone apps, but apart from that, I cannot really think of an example not only in my own niche (administrative systems in mid-to-large companies, so ERPs, Reservation systems etc.) but also in terms of things that I never worked on, but I use regularly.

E.g.: Google took out all their attempts at creating a social network (I remember Orkut and Google+, probably there were others). They were the competitors (to Facebook) and no matter how "nimble" they were in adding or changing features, in the end they just quit.

Word/Office is probably another classica example of something that has lots of "design decisions" layered like geological strata, but they are still dominating the market (I am Mac User, btw, so I am not talking of Open Office as a "innovative alternative", here.)

The authors seems to think that customers can't wait to get rid of, I dunno, Oracle Finance, as soon as someone comes in with more feature... in my experience the reality is that no matter how much they hate the old workhorse, having to convert lots of existing data (and adapt processes, and retrain personnel) is a cost which is very difficult to justify, and no amount of "shiny new features" will really be the main driving force in such decisions.

> I mean, is this really the case?

"Disruption" is a smaller company with less baggage finding a way to do something better than some ancient behemoth. Pick any of many examples that show that's the case.

If it weren't for disruptive startups, HN would not exist.

The point isn't that disruption can't happen, as we know it can. The point is that is can take a lot to dislodge an entrenched product, usually more than just new features, especially rarely used new features.

As pointed out, the main driver is switching cost. Going to HN has low switching cost. Moving off Oracle has very high switching cost. I know of companies that have been actively trying to move off mainframes for 30+ years and are still paying switching costs.

Yes, this was exactly my point, and thanks for having articulated it better.

In my experience "Wow, X provides much better features than Y" works in two cases:

a) I am doing product selection, i.e. I am not using Y or anything else, but I now need to do something new and X will get my money because it is a better fit.

b) I am already using something, but switching to X has negligible cost. Like, I am tired of Evernote, I'll switch to Whatever, they even provide a webscraper that will automate migration with little effort.

So yes, especially for "a" the competitor will gobble up your (potential) new customers. But this is not exactly the most common scenario.

I understand that HN is geared mostly towards startups and SAS companies, but we shouldn't forget that the vast majority of companies were created before 2023 (or 2010 or 2000), therefore they have so much invested already in dinosaurean applicative stacks that "implementing new features faster" will not be enough to make them switch.

> "Disruption" is a smaller company with less baggage finding a way to do something better than some ancient behemoth.

It's much more complicated than that, and it's really worth reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma to understand the concept.

In general, disruption happens when the rules of the industry change. It's not just a matter of a small company with less baggage undercutting an established player.

disruption isn't a single thing, it can absolutely come from a more nimble competitor.

You're confusing disruption with ordinary competition.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

IE, if business A looses out to business B because it's "more nimble," that's not disruption.

IE, if/when electric cars take off, gas stations will be "disrupted." Not because the competitors were more nimble, but because the fundamental rules of how people charge cars are different than how people buy gas. (Most charging happens at home or at a destination, therefore a gas station that simply swaps out pumps for chargers won't see the same kind of business.)

and I think your language skills are lacking, words can have multiple meanings with subtleties. I doubt you would get most of the general population to agree that a competitor knocking someone out of the running or forcing them to fundamentally change how they do things is not a disruption.

you can even see it in the wiki article you linked. They gave it a unique phrase (disruptive innovation) rather than just saying "disruption" followed by a mic drop.

> They gave it a unique phrase (disruptive innovation) rather than just saying "disruption" followed by a mic drop.

Technically you are right. But other uses are right too. Audience context matters.

So many people here are familiar with "disruptive innovation" vs. "non-disruptive innovation" and "sustaining innovation", and find those distinctions relevant, that "innovation" can often be dropped without much confusion here.

I.e. "disruptive", "non-disruptive", and "sustaining" + <competition>, <technology>, <strategy>, <business model>, etc.

It would be very cumbersome to include "innovation" in every one of those phrases.

It would beat the word to death 1000 times over, if every business or technology discussion had to keep explicitly saying it, when it can almost always be assumed to be relevant.

Language isn't just definitions, it is also context/culture/group sensitive. Which doesn't make you wrong - but it doesn't make the more specialized usage wrong or less useful, if you are sensitive to it.

When in doubt, use the natives' interpretation.

I find it amusing that I stepped into this conversation stating disruption can mean multiple things and you felt I was the one that needed to be lectured on the idea that disruption can mean many different things.

go lecture someone else.

I don’t think I’d ever call anything from google “nimble”

They were pretty nimble late 2000's, early 2010's.

Maybe in the 2000s, by the 2010s they just started products that would fail (or not sometimes) and kill them.

Maybe that fits a definition of nimble, but I wouldn’t call it that.

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