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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.

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Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around here that it's become something of a pseudo-intellectual discussion starter.

While I agree that the term is overused, in its genesis of popularity, it referred to a real (and previously unnamed) phenomenon: wben an un-(or less-)profitable market eats a more-profitable one, such that players in the grown-up market are misled by listening to their customers.

If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.

And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.

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