Stop "Disrupting" Everything

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html

by davmre • 13 years ago

48 46 13 years ago

slate.com

mathattack• 13 years ago

I agree completely. Sometimes it's possible to great things without attacking an existing market from the bottom.

wmf• 13 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499

davmre• 13 years ago

Ah, thanks. Apparently the HN dupe detector doesn't know that 'slate.com' and 'www.slate.com' are the same site. :-)

charlesism• 13 years ago

Wasn't there a post here last year entitled: "Let's Disrupt Waiting Rooms"? The average doctor's waiting room has plenty of room for improvement, but using "Disrupt" in that context is a little hyperbolic.

agilebyte• 13 years ago

Yes, improve, just do not do it like my GP. Now all (sick) people have to click through a touch screen upon their arrival for an appointment...

devanti• 13 years ago

and stop "hacking" everything

possibilistic• 13 years ago

Never.

You're missing the point of what it is to be a hacker.

tarr11• 13 years ago

I think OP means this: https://www.google.com/search?q=top+10+hacks

Sae5waip• 13 years ago

Making lots of money with web applications, apparently (or trying to, anyway).

Real hacking is non-commercial.

RokStdy• 13 years ago

From the article: "...What makes disruptive innovations so deadly is they’re not better than your product. They’re worse. Anyone who needed a mainframe at the dawn of the personal computer era would find a PC to be an incredibly lame and underpowered alternative..."

I particularly like the statement above. I think the PC example is a good one, and then smartphones/tablets did the same thing to PCs.

Charos• 13 years ago

Absolutely true. A tablet isn't as capable as a PC is, yet. Trying to do my taxes on my Nexus 7 would be a nightmare. But it satisfies a very good use case: a cheap, portable device for casual computing and media consumption. The only fundamental thing standing in the way of tablets completely eclipsing PCs is the input method. If we can get a good replacement for the keyboard/mouse on a touchscreen device, the days of traditional PCs could be numbered.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

If you're talking specifically tablets, then you won't get any extra input methods - when a tablet is used, your hands are in a position that only the touchsceen can be used effectively and your other appendages are not that useful for input.

So either we figure out how to make touchscreen+voice to work effectively for content creation, or we'll have to use something other than a tablet experience for that.

jarrett• 13 years ago

You're right about input. But I doubt a touchscreen will ever suffice for a lot of professional work.

For graphics and CAD work, I need the precision of a mouse cursor. My laptop's trackpad works great, and my mouse works even better. My fingertip on a screen, by contrast, will always feel clumsy in comparison. Fingers are just too fat. The only way they become not too fat is with a gigantic screen. But then that's not really a tablet. And gigantic screens can be ergonomically bad, because they force you to bend your neck looking at them.

Likewise, for serious typing, I need the tactile response of a keyboard. Touch-typing on a touchscreen is frustrating.

Of course, there's no reason you can't attach a mouse and keyboard to a tablet. But then you basically have a laptop that doesn't fold closed. It's hard to consider that a uniquely tablet-esque experience.

pertinhower• 13 years ago

Man that is one game-changing article. It has convinced me to downsize my use of business cliches, going forward. It plucks the low hanging fruit. It has totally shifted my paradigm, acted as the tipping point for my disdain of faddish phrases.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

What's with all the buzzwords? That's not out of the box thinking!

Domenic_S• 13 years ago

Boy, this comment really resonates.

jrockway• 13 years ago

I only have one ask: and that's that you also use the word "synergy".

jonahx• 13 years ago

I also appreciated how the author made his ideas dead-simple, and how his sentences were lovingly hand-crafted.

thearn4• 13 years ago

Fomite2• 13 years ago

Words I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from common use: "Disrupt", "Hack", "Stakeholders"

cylinder• 13 years ago

Nor would I, but I also wouldn't mind seeing Slate and The Atlantic vanish from the internet.

gavinlynch• 13 years ago

"space" is also a great adjunct next to "disrupt" that needs to be destroyed. How about I "disrupt" the "space" next to your "face".

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

Minor quibble: I think stakeholders is a fairly important word, albeit overused.

I have company X. I want to describe something that matters to the founders, the shareholders, the employees, and the clients. All of these people are stakeholders. In the greater sense, stakeholders refers to the people affected by what you're doing, and isn't that what we're all doing every day?

Ask yourself: What am I doing today, and for whom? Everyone is a stakeholder in something.

</soapbox>

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

So instead of "stakeholders" let's just say "people who care" (about X).

tedsanders• 13 years ago

Agreed. It's interesting how words carry connotation and how those connotations affect the mematic propagation of those words. There's a lot of signalling and culture and counterculture embodied in our style choices, including word choices.

richforrester• 13 years ago

This will keep happening. The same way parallax sites were hip for a while. The same way everyone turned to flat UI, or how we made "painting x" with CSS alone.

And thanks to these patterns, every now and then, we get an awesome HN Parody site.

What a wonderful herd.

Jugurtha4• 13 years ago

A-frigging-men ! One has only to look at the Hacker News feed. It's packed with new start-ups "disrupting" everything.

I launch Thunderbird and go "Here's yet another 'disruptor' hiring". Or "Let's revolutionize X". Come on (insert three exclamation points here).

The only thing this is disrupting is the power of that word. It got diluted, like every buzz word. And now everything is bleeding edge, disruptive, fantastic, agile and "beautiful".

Rainbows, and unicorns, and butterflies ! Oh, my!

EpicEng2• 13 years ago

Agreed. Whenever is see yet another HN link along the lines of "X is hiring, come help us disrupt Y!" I subconsciously read "come join our ill-conceived startup which is almost guaranteed to fail within a year!" It's cliche and I wouldn't even bother looking at such an add.

princess3000• 13 years ago

Sounds like you're not the epic rockstar ninja they're looking for anyway.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Could we HNers declare war on cliché?

Oh...... "war on". Doh!!!!

I'll get me coat...

mman• 13 years ago

Stop "Stop Xing" everything

jff• 13 years ago

"Let's disrupt the homeless problem by offering free HTML classes in shelters!"

(I have seen basically this exact sentence posted here)

fleitz• 13 years ago

Homelessness isn't a problem, it's an industry solution to leverage from labour.

Jugurtha4• 13 years ago

This is hilarious ! Somebody had just seen "The Pursuit of HappYness" and took it to the next level.

Let's offer "Hot Soup Processor" classes for free and will have homeless people coming in thinking there's hot soup in there.. And that wouldn't be as bad as HTML classes. At least there's "hot soup" in the name. As Zed Shaw would put it: "Incentive, motherfucker. Do you speak it !".

theandrewbailey• 13 years ago

Whenever I hear the word "disrupt", I despair.

radley• 13 years ago

1. Typical link bait by Slate.

2. Site unreadable / unscalable on Galaxy S4.

Jugurtha4• 13 years ago

Every time I see this, I imagine the guy being like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4

Stop "Disrupting" Everything

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