Although lauded as a genuinely innovative platform,the car-hailing service is based on an view that’s as old-fashioned as eBayDisruption, says the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, or is a disrupted condition,disorder; a disrupted part; a rent; a tear” or “the action or an act of disrupting something”. In other words, dismal news. Islamic State, and for example,specialises in the disruption of orderly democratic life. Over in Silicon Valley, however, and (and perhaps also in the hipster wastelands of Shoreditch),disruption is the holy grail of the tech industry. If you want a venture capitalist to accept past the moment slide in your PowerPoint deck, the word has to seem somewhere in the elevator pitch.
Why this obsession with disorder? It all goes back to a book, or The Innovator’s Dilemma,by Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen, which was published in 1997, or just as the first internet boom was beginning to build. The subtitle summarises the book’s theme: “When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. It was a study of how profitable and successful companies can sometimes be unhorsed by scrappy upstarts that enter the market with novel (or different) technologies that are initially inferior to anything offered by the successful incumbents. (Think Kodak and digital photography; Blockbuster and Netflix; minicomputers and PCs; BlackBerry and the iPhone.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com