Disrupt has always been a strange name for the conference since almost every startup showing there has been a clone of another larger more popular startup.
I have literally had conversations with founders there that went,
"So tell me how you are different from Facebook,"
"Well we built our entire platform on node so it is infinitely scalable"
"Is that a problem with Facebook now? That it doesn't scale?"
"Well no, but we also re-imagined the interface"
"It looks like facebook, if Facebook was done in Twitter Bootstrap"
"That's exactly Right!"
"Did users ask for that?"
"Well No, but we also added support for sharing code snippets"
"That's interesting, so it is really a Facebook for Developer communities"
"Well No..."
"Do you think most people's mom and 4th grade english teacher want to see the code snippets in your timeline?"
"We don't really have a timeline, everything shared happens in realtime like the front page of hacker news"
"So if my friends want to see the pictures I took last week of my trip to Belize they can't see them?"
If you want to be disruptive you have to do something truly new. Something that will change the way everyone else does things. You also have to be prepared for all the knock-offs that might have better marketing, or better connections, so you should also have a bit of something no one can duplicate in your core.
The Disrupt conference has always been a showing of MVP's and betas that aren't even an MVP. But disruption occurs when you have something that is more than an MVP it is a Product no one can live without afterwards.
That's not the definition of "disrupt" used by Christensen (or by Yglesias in this article). Yglesias is arguing that we should return to the useful definition of disrupt as developing a product that is worse in most respects compared to existing products, except on price (and possibly size/portability). The quality you're talking about is something like "revolutionary," not disruptive.
A disruptive product meets the needs of a lower price point customer. For these users, the disruptive product is sufficient. The established company has overshot what the mass market needs in an effort to get more value out of their best customers.
Typically then the disruptive product is much better in a different metric. In his hard drive example, as each physical size had a much higher capacity than was necessary for the average user, metrics such as speed or physical size became more important. In his excavator example, once every shovel could move enough dirt, flexibility, maintainability, and mobility became more important.
Cheaper is often a part of the whole thing, but just making a cheaper product won't suffice. You generally have to compete on a metric orthogonal to the metric everything is judged based on now.
CPUs are going through it, the average CPU was more powerful than what "normal" people needed about 5 years ago, so now we're in a race along the power consumption/thermal output metric rather than raw computing power.
Oh but it does. McDonalds once meant cheap and shitty. So did Volkswagon. Japanese automobiles too. PCs were absolutely cheap and shitty. In the early 1980s, there were some powerful financial modelling applications for minicomputers. VisiCalc was cheap and shitty in comparison.
Uh...no. There's lots of cheap and shitty out there, and most of it doesn't survive because that's all it is. McDonalds, Volkswagens, PCs, VisiCalc, etc. all dominated because their "disruptiveness" overwhelmed their "cheap and shitty" - with the latter being applicable because, since nobody had done it before, they didn't really know how to do it any better or didn't have the resources to. Customers took one look at the new product, went "OMG I can't live without it", and bought into it bigtime because the benefits far outweighed the problems. Yeah, VisiCalc was nothing compared to some powerful financial modeling applications for minicomputers - IF you HAD a minicomputer which few could afford and required dedicated personnel for support, as opposed to cheap PCs and cheap software which instantly made spreadsheet software nearly as ubiquitous as spreadsheet paper.
I'll give you that that's definitely how the incumbents describe the disruptive competition in stage 2 of the standard 5 stages of disruption or whatever.
The key thing is that none of those were really "cheap and shitty." They were "cheap and good enough," which is different.
Good Enough is a very powerful thing. If you can beat the competition on price while still delivering a Good Enough product, you'll be buried in money.
It means too low quality for current customers, but good enough for non-consumers to become customers. PCs were not good enough for minicomputer users, but it was a lot better than pencil and paper and slide-rules. They cost thousands of dollars, but minicomputers were tens of thousands of dollars.
I think the problem lies in the fact that to "disrupt" the right industries, you need to have some experience in dinosaur industries/companies that could use better solutions.
Most young, talented developers never held a job inside one of those places in their lives, hence why they build Facebook clones instead.
Honestly, seek out some soul-sucking corporate job for a summer and see what you could do to improve the operations with software/hardware.
If you're in anything but consumer tech, then domain expertise is vital. And if you are in consumer tech then you have 100 other startups doing the exact same thing you are, and domain expertise is still pretty useful.
A good example is Shakr, a "social online hangout" which won Disrupt SF in 2011 [1] and raised $15M immediately after. Robert Scoble said it would become a $100M company.
Huh; it's probably a bad sign that I see a little too much of my own startup's pitch in that description.
(Then again, I usually describe my startup as "a group chat/collaboration tool that has learned from the reasons people prefer MMOs to IRC." Framed that way, it doesn't sound nearly so priggish--but I don't decide how it's framed, the public does. Sort of makes me worry.)
I have literally had conversations with founders there that went,
"So tell me how you are different from Facebook,"
"Well we built our entire platform on node so it is infinitely scalable"
"Is that a problem with Facebook now? That it doesn't scale?"
"Well no, but we also re-imagined the interface"
"It looks like facebook, if Facebook was done in Twitter Bootstrap"
"That's exactly Right!"
"Did users ask for that?"
"Well No, but we also added support for sharing code snippets"
"That's interesting, so it is really a Facebook for Developer communities"
"Well No..."
"Do you think most people's mom and 4th grade english teacher want to see the code snippets in your timeline?"
"We don't really have a timeline, everything shared happens in realtime like the front page of hacker news"
"So if my friends want to see the pictures I took last week of my trip to Belize they can't see them?"
If you want to be disruptive you have to do something truly new. Something that will change the way everyone else does things. You also have to be prepared for all the knock-offs that might have better marketing, or better connections, so you should also have a bit of something no one can duplicate in your core.
The Disrupt conference has always been a showing of MVP's and betas that aren't even an MVP. But disruption occurs when you have something that is more than an MVP it is a Product no one can live without afterwards.