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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

To actually disrupt an industry, there has to be a change that makes it possible, or some new niche or angle to attack a problem from.

I don't really see that in a lot of these examples.

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I second that. If you actually read "The Innovator's Dilemma" it defines disruption narrowly as when a start-up overtakes an incumbent with an inferior product that appeals to a new market. If you really want to "disrupt" a company, don't look for problems with the big competitors. Look for potential markets they're ignoring.

But all you start-up people use "disrupt" to describe any competition between start-ups and big business. Worse, you all seem to think start-ups have the advantage, because the incumbents are big and old and you are nimble and young.

Sorry, but history has shown that market leaders will almost always crush you. If you innovate, they will just copy your innovation and throw more marketing dollars behind it. Historically, start-ups only prevail when they reach out to new markets ignored by the competition. Big, successful businesses are totally beholden to their current customers. They can't reach out to new markets without cannibalizing profits of their current product line.

Incumbents wont always copy innovations. When you innovate to hit an overshot section of the incumbents market, or non-consumers in the incumbents market, you create asynchronous skills. The incumbent typically will ignore you because you're taking their low end clients, but eventually, the innovations that won the low end clients will improve and you will move up market. That is how disruption works, almost always through innovation.

I think when you say innovation you mean sustaining innovation, which is where you build something that serves the most profitable section of the market, therefore motivating incumbents to copy you. When playing that game it's almost always a lose for the startup, unless you quickly sell out to an incumbent.

There are some situations where incumbents will be motivated to fight startups on low profit clients. Typically this is when you have an incumbent who's profitability comes from having a high volume of low profit customers. In cases like that, it's not likely you will get a foothold unnoticed.

I should have been more clear. "Sustaining" innovations is what I'm talking about. As long as incumbents see an innovation as valuable to their current customer base, they will adopt it. It's the innovations that appeal to outside markets that start ups thrive with.

Thank you for clarifying this.

Agreed, the author is using "disruption" to mean "compete with". Microsoft did not really disrupt IBM, it just changed the competitive landscape.

The Innovator's Dilemma has a much more nuanced view of disruption: an inferior product that ends up beating the entrenched player because of a side-benefit. It's pretty relevant if you want to take on eBay, LinkedIn, or Google: you're not going to build a better search engine than Google, but you can build one that respects privacy, runs without ads, etc. if that's what users really care about.

Crossing the Chasm also talks about this: it's very, very difficult to beat an established company at their own game. You're more likely to do so by attacking a niche they are not interested in, or are weak in, and growing from there.

Establishing a beach-head is a very slow road but it has a good chance of success. What I'm getting at in the post is that there are some game-changing circumstances at play since those companies were founded and they all appear to have huge, not so easy to fix blind spots. That creates opportunities. Compare ebay or Google with Amazon and Zappos. I definitely do not see Amazon and Zappos as vulnerable when it comes to their core, Google is at its core not a search engine anymore but an advertising company and exactly there they are left wanting. Ebay is hurting badly right now, someone that moves fast might be able to inflict serious damage before the window of opportunity closes again.

Naturally, none of this is going to be easy. But I think it just might be doable.

Changing the competitive landscape could very will be the definition of disruption.

There's a pretty good case that "mobile" is the 10x force and major change that opens up basically every early web property to disruption.

Payments / bitcoin innovation is a second likely 10x factor (in particular for ebay).

Agreed on mobile, not sure about payments/bitcoin at the present time (but it could very well become something like that).

I agree on this point. I think wintel disrupted IBM in the fortune 500 terminal space with PCs. which is eating the mainframe. but I think a technology change needs to happen to disrupt a space. You have to have some kind of strategic advantage that the compitition doesn't have gonig for them. I read an interesting article that said that customers need at least 10x increase in value for a company to ride a product etc to make it to an ipo.

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