Stop “Disrupting” Everything | Hacker News Reader

Stop “Disrupting” Everything

slate.com

103 pointsjamesbritt80 comments

Disrupt has always been a strange name for the conference since almost every startup showing there has been a clone of another larger more popular startup.

I have literally had conversations with founders there that went,

"So tell me how you are different from Facebook,"

"Well we built our entire platform on node so it is infinitely scalable"

"Is that a problem with Facebook now? That it doesn't scale?"

"Well no, but we also re-imagined the interface"

"It looks like facebook, if Facebook was done in Twitter Bootstrap"

"That's exactly Right!"

"Did users ask for that?"

"Well No, but we also added support for sharing code snippets"

"That's interesting, so it is really a Facebook for Developer communities"

"Well No..."

"Do you think most people's mom and 4th grade english teacher want to see the code snippets in your timeline?"

"We don't really have a timeline, everything shared happens in realtime like the front page of hacker news"

"So if my friends want to see the pictures I took last week of my trip to Belize they can't see them?"

If you want to be disruptive you have to do something truly new. Something that will change the way everyone else does things. You also have to be prepared for all the knock-offs that might have better marketing, or better connections, so you should also have a bit of something no one can duplicate in your core.

The Disrupt conference has always been a showing of MVP's and betas that aren't even an MVP. But disruption occurs when you have something that is more than an MVP it is a Product no one can live without afterwards.

That's not the definition of "disrupt" used by Christensen (or by Yglesias in this article). Yglesias is arguing that we should return to the useful definition of disrupt as developing a product that is worse in most respects compared to existing products, except on price (and possibly size/portability). The quality you're talking about is something like "revolutionary," not disruptive.

I really wouldn't have thought that "disrupt" meant cheap and shitty.

Oh but it does. McDonalds once meant cheap and shitty. So did Volkswagon. Japanese automobiles too. PCs were absolutely cheap and shitty. In the early 1980s, there were some powerful financial modelling applications for minicomputers. VisiCalc was cheap and shitty in comparison.

I'll give you that that's definitely how the incumbents describe the disruptive competition in stage 2 of the standard 5 stages of disruption or whatever.

Uh...no. There's lots of cheap and shitty out there, and most of it doesn't survive because that's all it is. McDonalds, Volkswagens, PCs, VisiCalc, etc. all dominated because their "disruptiveness" overwhelmed their "cheap and shitty" - with the latter being applicable because, since nobody had done it before, they didn't really know how to do it any better or didn't have the resources to. Customers took one look at the new product, went "OMG I can't live without it", and bought into it bigtime because the benefits far outweighed the problems. Yeah, VisiCalc was nothing compared to some powerful financial modeling applications for minicomputers - IF you HAD a minicomputer which few could afford and required dedicated personnel for support, as opposed to cheap PCs and cheap software which instantly made spreadsheet software nearly as ubiquitous as spreadsheet paper.

The key thing is that none of those were really "cheap and shitty." They were "cheap and good enough," which is different.

Good Enough is a very powerful thing. If you can beat the competition on price while still delivering a Good Enough product, you'll be buried in money.

It means too low quality for current customers, but good enough for non-consumers to become customers. PCs were not good enough for minicomputer users, but it was a lot better than pencil and paper and slide-rules. They cost thousands of dollars, but minicomputers were tens of thousands of dollars.

That's not actually what Christensen was saying.

A disruptive product meets the needs of a lower price point customer. For these users, the disruptive product is sufficient. The established company has overshot what the mass market needs in an effort to get more value out of their best customers.

Typically then the disruptive product is much better in a different metric. In his hard drive example, as each physical size had a much higher capacity than was necessary for the average user, metrics such as speed or physical size became more important. In his excavator example, once every shovel could move enough dirt, flexibility, maintainability, and mobility became more important.

Cheaper is often a part of the whole thing, but just making a cheaper product won't suffice. You generally have to compete on a metric orthogonal to the metric everything is judged based on now.

CPUs are going through it, the average CPU was more powerful than what "normal" people needed about 5 years ago, so now we're in a race along the power consumption/thermal output metric rather than raw computing power.

A good example is Shakr, a "social online hangout" which won Disrupt SF in 2011 [1] and raised $15M immediately after. Robert Scoble said it would become a $100M company.

Yeah...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc...

Shaker is a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections

Good grief.

And it beat out Trello too. Something that (at least for my circle) I would argue really was disruptive.

Huh; it's probably a bad sign that I see a little too much of my own startup's pitch in that description.

(Then again, I usually describe my startup as "a group chat/collaboration tool that has learned from the reasons people prefer MMOs to IRC." Framed that way, it doesn't sound nearly so priggish--but I don't decide how it's framed, the public does. Sort of makes me worry.)

I think the problem lies in the fact that to "disrupt" the right industries, you need to have some experience in dinosaur industries/companies that could use better solutions.

Most young, talented developers never held a job inside one of those places in their lives, hence why they build Facebook clones instead.

Honestly, seek out some soul-sucking corporate job for a summer and see what you could do to improve the operations with software/hardware.

If you're in anything but consumer tech, then domain expertise is vital. And if you are in consumer tech then you have 100 other startups doing the exact same thing you are, and domain expertise is still pretty useful.

The drama around words like this is between people who don't actually use the concepts they represent. The words "disrupt", "synergy", and "cloud" are useful words ONLY if:

- You care about the high level strategies a startup might implement in order to take on an entrenched player who is playing a game no one can beat them at.

- You are seeking mutually beneficial intra-business relationships.

- You would like to provision machines without managing them yourself.

Journalists and non-practitioners fight back and forth about words like this because they have no skin in the game. I will continue happily using the word "disrupt" because I read the Innovator's Dilemma and I think Christensen highlighted a powerful concept that needed a label. And I will continue using the word "cloud" because I remember what it was like to have to buy a dedicated server every time I wanted to spin up a new service.

And I could give a rat's ass if some journalist thinks that's hokem.

> Journalists and non-practitioners fight back and forth about words like this because they have no skin in the game

Actually I think that the real problem is with unscrupulous marketing from practitioners than with journalists and non-practitioners. When a word becomes a trend, everybody wants in, so the word is stretched so much that it loses its original usefulness.

Take cloud for example - what does it really mean today? Even the usual old VPS today is marketed as a "cloud" solution...

Cloud has never had meaning. I always thought that fog was the much more appropriate weather event for the vague concept that all the different people tried to push.

Cloud is a VPS plus a decently real-time API for provisioning and configuration, so I can treat servers as an abstract software component. Pre-cloud era VPSes often required humans in the loop for simple administrative tasks.

My pet hate is 'impact'. There was a perfectly usable word before: affect. No-one uses it anymore, because everything has to have IMPACT! Not enough toilet paper in the loo today? How will that impact employee morale? Different brand batteries in your wireless keyboard? What IMPACT will that have on performance?

But sadly the horse has bolted on that one, its jig is up, and gone the way of the dodo... literally.

I believe you mean "effect", right?

I don't think so:

       "how will that impact X"
    vs "how will that affect X"

It depends on the specific case, since impact is used as both a noun and verb, while affect and effect in this sense are typically used as a verb and a noun respectively. In his two examples, one would be replaced with affect and one would be replaced with effect.

Both of them :)

Cloud mostly means "you don't pay your sysadmin; the colo does."

"Cloud" just means "outsourcing your infrastructure". Or, in some contexts, "I don't care how it works, as long as it does X, Y, and Z" (like the cloud in a network diagram).

> Take cloud for example - what does it really mean today?

I think it's a fancy word for "on the net".

It's what it has become - but originally it meant what now has become SaaS (eg gmail)

If the VPS is automatically provisioned and billed by the hour, it is "cloudy"

Great post. I really hate how the MBA douches have ruined "synergy" because there really is no good synonym when the word is appropriate.

There is probably something good in German, but it will be 18 letters long.

Evolutionary pressures on spoken language drive common concepts to claim shorter symbols, so it seems fine to pay 18 letters (plus an escape to an alternate language) for this more-rarified meaning of synergy, leaving "synergy" and "disrupt" as depleted membership tokens of the crunchosphere.

Yeah, let me know when I should start taking business advice from Slate.

The author also clearly stated that "disruptive" is indeed a powerful concept that needed a label. And he clearly stated that it should still be used in cases where it actually fits the model that Christensen intended. The whole premise of the article is that most people are using the term in cases where the concept doesn't match up at all, and I don't see how you're refuting that.

To a degree, he makes a valid point. Take the news industry. It most certainly is not any better at delivering informed content to users. Does it deliver content faster? Sure. Is it easier to get to it? Absolutely. But the natural constraints of the print editorial cycle forced journalists to wait before spraying us all with their breathless commentary. It used to be that editors were tasked with getting things right. Now they're just tasked with getting things out the door quickly so that they can maximize online ad revenue.

They're not actually 'maximizing ad revenue.' They're usually trying to maximize pageviews. Understanding that distinction seems to be beyond a lot of the online media business these days.

It'd be nice if startups in general took a step back and toned stuff down. Be ambitious and optimistic without pretending your website and the guy who's going to tweak it are solving Very Hard Problems, changing the world and of course disrupting whatever multi-billion dollar industry.

Those startups are the exception not the rule, if you're the only one saying it you're not really doing it.

Two thoughts: a lot of startups probably are low key, but you don't hear about them on the media circuit for obvious reasons; also, the process of raising money has a tendency to spiral into hyperbole.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but startups are hard. There's lots of ups and downs and getting people to buy into a vision of the world is a lot more comforting when you're working long days and weekends than thinking "gee I love slight iterations for profitable/quick exits". So while I agree with you, I understand why people do it.

I agree with the sentiment that not everything has to be disruptive to be successful, and it might even be important to distinguish between the two for your own mental stability (a modesty check, if you will), but I don't think it matters in the end to the industry. The concept of disruptive technology doesn't go away because the term is overused, and the brilliance of innovation doesn't depend on the accuracy of the terms used to define it.

But disruptive inventions are not necessarily brilliant. Modesty should have nothing to do with it. Certainly the iPhone can be brilliant without being disruptive.

When dealing with software it's rarely the case that worse-is-better, more often it's better-is-better.

Worse-is-better only comes up when the stuff already out there is very well done, polished, and too expensive for most people to afford.

Software is the original worse-is-better domain: Richard P. Gabriel coined the term to describe competition between software packages.

You're right of course, when dealing with desktop software packages. I was only thinking of the online web-startup stuff which is generally just plain better.

You are technically correct and I probably used too strong of a term to describe what I meant there. I only mean to say that labeling something as disruptive doesn't mean it is and vice versa.

At least as I've heard John Gruber tell it, Christensen at first thought the iPhone wouldn't be disruptive because he saw it (as did most) as high-end phone, targeted at high-end users. What it really was, he later realized, was a small, cheap computer. Now iPhone-style smartphones outsell PCs.

the sentiment that not everything has to be disruptive to be successful

this is seriously amateur framing.

I think the kind of disruption the author is referring to is Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" or Schumpeter's gale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

If using a word, such as "disruptive", will give you a small gain in marketing advantage, or the lack of will give you a disadvantage, then people will always spam/abuse it until it becomes a meaningless buzzword, or until investor grew earwax to protect themselves from it, or until it is perceived that anyone uses this word is most likely BSing. Then people are going to adapt away from using such a word. Most people probably understand that their stuff isn't the next facebook, but they will try everything to get the last bit of investor attention.

There must be one of those standard quippy hacker "laws" about the usefulness of new conceptual term being directly correlated to the rate that it will be diluted into meaninglessness in the hands of progressively declining foodchain of marketing goons.

How about this: once your term has a conference dedicated to it, it has crossed the line from useful term to useless marketing buzzword.

I always thought people shouted the "Help us Disrupt" thing because they want people to shift to them because they are 'better' than the evil mega-corps and 'have the best interest of their users at heart' instead of, you know, actually having a better offering at a lower cost.

Don't "disrupt" everything, start fixing shit that's broken.

Like companies like TechCrunch who co-opt words like "disrupt" for their flaccid marketing purposes? The world of TC is the world of wannabes.

If there's one thing TC always wanted for itself but as a section of the peanut gallery they could never have, is an ability to "disrupt" anything. Obviously they needed to turn that inferiority boat into dollars, with Arrington as cartographer for the sailing map.

I disagree with all the examples that aren't disruptive, google, online dating, and Uber. People forget how crude and limited they were to begin with.

I would really like to know why this was downvoted.

Probably because your statement didn't include any rationale for your disagreement, and specifically didn't address his direct claim, which is that each of these was better than the alternative at their genesis. In disruption as described by Christensen, a market is being overserved by an incumbent relative to the needs of buyers, and the disruptor offers a somewhat worse product at a dramatically lower price, not a BETTER product. Google was superior to Yahoo along every dimension. Uber was a dramatically better experience than a taxi, and was also MORE EXPENSIVE.

good point. uber and online dating both lacked the network to be superior initially. it's hard to say what industry search engines disrupted... (libraries, yellow pages, encyclopedias, travel agents?) but in 1998 when google was founded, they indexed 26 million pages.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.h...

Here is the original google: http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-google-serv...

Regarding the statement Google was always superior to yahoo... it would be nice to have a timeframe, because Google provided Yahoo's results as late as 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

My point is that the author is a mainstream adopter and is comparing the mainstream products to their counterparts that they disrupted.

"Disruption" rhetoric reminds me of those clerics in the Middle East who preach peace and forgiveness in English and war and vengeance in their native tongue in the same speech.

Founders who give a shit about TechCrunch want to be corporate. (There are many founders who don't, and I'm not talking about them.) They want in the club. They use "disruption" rhetoric to inspire 22-year-old engineers to work 90-hour-weeks, but what they really want is to join what they feint against on stage, and they profit immensely from the sale of young, clueless talent ($5 million per head acq-hires where those engineers themselves are lucky to get $47) is their way of getting there.

Of course its a buzzword.It's the new "innovation". When it'll wear out another one will come up.

Pretty sure we're still buzzing "innovation".

In general I find Ygleasis's articles to be overrated. i.e. don't really add any value.

Ubicomp has been hating on disruption for over a decade.

"hating on" is another such, er, phrase that I hate.

"decrying the anathema of" then, you oldschooler not-at-all-hipster you

Im NOT disrupting anything.

I am Pioneering something!

I am trail blazing. I am the one not following the pack. I am the one going in the opposite direction.

If you're going in the opposite direction, doesn't that mean you're going backwards?

That's the kind of one-dimensional thinking we're trying to disrupt.

That's the kind of disruptive thinking we're trying to disrupt. With disruption.

Backwards and forwards are relative terms. And one-dimensional.

Sometimes by going only forward, you might simply hit a local maxima.

It can be both. For example, if you find a better way to run a 'newspaper,' then you're disrupting an existing industry, but you could also be trailblazing in the way that you approach it (i.e. a way that no one as ever tried before).

Isn't slate disrupting the use of disrupt?

Just replace "disrupt" with "steal". Then decide if you're ok with being a part of that redistribution.

Funny, I was just today thinking about the overuse of another word: "hacker", after seeing another job posting here for a programmer, but using that word.

It's been abused so much that I am not even sure what it means any more. But, when I read the job descriptions, there's generally nothing beyond a standard programmer that is being sought. If every programmer is now supposedly a hacker, then what's the point of the word?

Smells more like companies just trying to sound cool, which of course has the opposite effect and is annoying to boot.

The fact that we are encouraged to celebrate disruption and people are even using the term in their branding is testament to the dearth of true innovation.

So many startups are busy trying to one-up existing products and services, but relatively few seem to be trying to create new products/services/markets.

I'd be pretty happy if people stopped using the phrase "ripe for disruption".

If enough people agree, does that make the phrase autological...?

Regardless of how our projects and lives play out, the term has become over-used. The comparison to "synergy" I would improve by comparing it instead to either "extreme" (for you older folks) or (Xenu forbid) "random".

when I use the word "disrupt" it means forget market prices and market mechanisms, because we are "disrupting" this market.

example startup: "We found 1000 tons of diamonds and have a wholesale buyer. we'd like to dig it up." market mechamism: whole diamond price, mining equipment price, purchase orders ,etc.

example "disruptive" startp: "We found a way to pull diamonds out of thin air without paying anything for them. As we no longer need any wholesaler our route to market is direct to consumer at 100x volume. we are the mcdonald's of diamonds."

See the difference? One is the existing mechanism. The other is something new.

Fair enough. That's not how the term is used in The Innovator's Dilemma, though.

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