Slashdot Mirror
The Problem, Really, is This Thing Called 'Disruption' (wired.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: The word "disruption" is everywhere in tech -- and it's getting founders in trouble. Just look at what happened with Bodega last week: Had the startup not professed to be disrupting the mom-and-pop shops on every corner, it might not have landed itself in such hot water. At Backchannel, veteran Silicon Valley communications whiz Karen Wickre makes the case against "disruption," pointing out that many of today's biggest companies got their starts without claiming to completely upend an existing industry. She writes: "What if Sergey and Larry had touted Google, in 1998, as 'an unprecedented platform for disrupting global advertising?' Do you think Jeff Bezos claimed that Amazon.com was upending global retail? Netflix? Within a few months of its 1997 launch, it did not foresee the actual paradigm shift of media streaming."
The "disruption" being talked about in the summary is that of external disruption, where a newcomer comes in with a radically different approach and renders the incumbents irrelevant.
It's a shame that it didn't focus more on self-disruption. Note that self-disruption is different from internal disruption. Internal disruption is when a company sees that it will be disrupted in the near future, and becomes the one that disrupts itself preemptively. Microsoft's Azure platform, and especially its adoption of Linux on Azure, are examples of this.
Self-disruption is when a producer tries a radically new approach without there being much, if any, risk of external disruption. More importantly, this effort is often such a failure that it in effect drives users or customers to a radically different product, which ends up causing an unintended external disruption. A great example of this happening is the Debian project's switch to systemd. Doing this in effect destroyed the benefits of Debian for many of its users, with systemd causing reliability problems. This drove many of Debian's best users over to OSes like FreeBSD and macOS, even though before the systemd debacle there was little risk of these Debian users moving to those alternative OSes on their own.
Disruption is a very complex field of study, and we shouldn't focus on just external disruption. We should also consider internal disruption and self-disruption, too.
People love the idea of disruption when it rapes and pillages monopolistic industries that deserve to be disrupted. Yellow Cabs, yes. Corner convenience stores, not so much.
Anything that I spend my own money on, I want disrupted as much as possible. The more I go to convenience stores, the more I'd like 'em disrupted.
Just don't touch the industries where my paychecks come from.
And don't point out that everything is related so that if you disrupt my convenience store you'll eventually, however indirectly, end up disrupting my paychecks. Shh. I don't wanna hear it.
Adapting to change is for other people!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.