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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."
"I'm going to put a bunch of people out of business and create a new way to do business in this vertical" is not a way to endear yourself to people in this day and age. Walmart, Amazon, Google, etc didn't get to where they are by telling people they're going to rape and pillage entire industries. They got their by hiding that fact until their momentum couldn't be stopped.
Top-left corner.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is a great example of the problem of requiring "disruption".
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
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.
They try to find where the gaps exist and exploit them without thinking of what that does to everyone involved.
At the Black Caucus Town Hall meeting last night, one of our delegates talked about criminal justice reform. They were proud of having passed new laws that assigned bail based on things like flight risk and the danger a person posed to a community, reducing the amount of mass-incarceration.
They were also quite proud of having worked out the legal language such that they'd prevented a complete collapse of the bail bondsman industry. In other words: they made sure to put black people under enough financial duress to keep the bondsmen (enormous cash holders) in business using poor black peoples's money.
So, to recap: even though we think you're not a danger and not a flight risk, we're still going to make sure to transfer some of your money to that rich guy's pocket so he can continue getting rich off poor people and be happier.
They also quoted statistics that some 70% of these people weren't convicted of anything and got released, which is why it's so imperative we don't bond them on ludicrously-high bail and keep them locked up for 2 months awaiting trial. We have laws to automatically expunge their records because of this.
By the by, the reason everything you buy is available and affordable is we've spent a lot of time reducing the number of jobs involved in making anything. The first part of price--the major, immutable part--is wages, and in a more-fundamental sense, labor. We can't create time; we have to do more with the same human labor time, or w can't physically possess more, much less afford to buy it. In the end, we're trading time. So "at the expense of the many"? That "expense" is that the many have a greater standard-of-living--it's the difference between the US and a poor third-world country like Chile.
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That's how Netflix took down Blockbuster. They kept their huge profits secret till they went public. By that time it was too late for Blockbuster video rental store (Yes, they really did have a store that rented movies.)
Now, everyone tries to brag in order to get money. It's self defeating. If you are truly a disruptive technology, you should be working your ass to keep that secret. Claim you expect to get 20% of the market, not 80%.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Reed Hastings has been quoted on a number of occasions saying exactly that. "There's a reason we didn't call the company 'DVD-by-Mail.com.'" They also nearly screwed it up entirely with the whole "Qwickster" debacle, which Hastings also discussed. There's also more than a little cherry picking going on here. Picking a few "winners" and then extrapolating that because they didn't seek "disruption" as part of their business plan makes this kind of a puff piece. Not to mention the egregious use of other stupid buzzwords like "paradigm shift" in the description. I'd also like to believe the reason the Bodega folks got in hot water what that it was pretty easy to see that they were going down the Jucero path by over-engineering and hyping what amounts a vending machine -- a technology that's been with us a really long time, and that can already do pretty much everything they were promising. Source for dvd-by-mail: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/1... Source of Qwickster debacle: http://deadline.com/2014/05/re...
There's no surer way to kill your creativity than to try to be creative.
Now the goal for any new business is to grow; and if it grows fast enough and large enough, disruption of businesses already in that space is an inevitable side effect. But focusing on disruption itself may be a distraction, what you want to do is focus on execution and finances.
I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos wants to control the world -- commercially. He wants to own every way you have of obtaining anything. But while that's been in the cards from day one, what sets Amazon apart is execution.
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The trend has been started by one guy, who wrote management books in the 80s-90s.
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As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy