http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation
To actually disrupt an industry, there has to be a change that makes it possible, or some new niche or angle to attack a problem from.
I don't really see that in a lot of these examples.
But all you start-up people use "disrupt" to describe any competition between start-ups and big business. Worse, you all seem to think start-ups have the advantage, because the incumbents are big and old and you are nimble and young.
Sorry, but history has shown that market leaders will almost always crush you. If you innovate, they will just copy your innovation and throw more marketing dollars behind it. Historically, start-ups only prevail when they reach out to new markets ignored by the competition. Big, successful businesses are totally beholden to their current customers. They can't reach out to new markets without cannibalizing profits of their current product line.
I think when you say innovation you mean sustaining innovation, which is where you build something that serves the most profitable section of the market, therefore motivating incumbents to copy you. When playing that game it's almost always a lose for the startup, unless you quickly sell out to an incumbent.
There are some situations where incumbents will be motivated to fight startups on low profit clients. Typically this is when you have an incumbent who's profitability comes from having a high volume of low profit customers. In cases like that, it's not likely you will get a foothold unnoticed.
The Innovator's Dilemma has a much more nuanced view of disruption: an inferior product that ends up beating the entrenched player because of a side-benefit. It's pretty relevant if you want to take on eBay, LinkedIn, or Google: you're not going to build a better search engine than Google, but you can build one that respects privacy, runs without ads, etc. if that's what users really care about.
Payments / bitcoin innovation is a second likely 10x factor (in particular for ebay).
But, end of the day, LinkedIn is still a beast, has a tremendous network effect to defeat, and actually works for its millions of users:
* many developers actually like to get the various recruiter and big co contacts
* for business guys, LinkedIn actually works to make credible cold contacts with people who would be interested in doing business
* the emails that tell you when your friend switches jobs are useful and important in the same way Facebook's birthday reminders are
* LinkedIn is doing a decent job further managing the product - it has gotten more useful over the years
So what if you think endorsements are lame and sometimes LinkedIn accidentally tells you a profile update means a new job, when it doesn't. So what if you are a special snowflake who, with hundreds of thousands of others, doesn't find LinkedIn useful, and too aggressive? It's those very engagement tactics that make sure the network is complete and the metadata is fresh.
Sometimes, it can be useful to be reminded of a birthday for somebody you actually want to get a gift for.
The disruption is surely TV without channels and relying on the Internet for distribution. How do you picture Canle TV disruption looking?
For my use case, it just needs mainstream sports :) (and I find the Twitch.TV acquisition interesting because of that ).
I just suscribed to Cable TV to watch the (football/soccer) World Cup, I wouldn't have considered it otherwise.
I have never been much of a fan of Facebook but seeing how most of my family's use of the Internet is wrapped up in Facebook, they might be around for a very long time.
I agree with the article but Myspace and Yahoo are commonly used examples of ousted market leaders but the market was young(er) when they were disrupted.
* SAP * PTC * EMC
(Please! please! please! please!)
I worked at Bridgestone Golf for a few months (a tyre company that also made golf items, go figure), and because we were situated in their manufacturing plant, we were lucky enough to use SAP for our sales and distribution.
It was the most horrendous experience of my life, and I sat there thinking that surely there would be a part of this beast that could disrupted. However, SAP is such a sprawling mess that where would you start?
My example here is Reverb.com, an online auction site for musical instruments and gear (particularly rock instruments, not classical). Reverb.com provides a gorgeous, Etsy-like interface, terrific targeted marketing, etc. It's backed by a major used instrument vendor (Chicago Music Exchange), and is quickly gaining momentum. Once sellers can have the same chance of sale and the same kinds of prices that EBay fetches, and buyers have enough selection to make the site really sticky (it's practically designed for window-shopping), some people will simply stop using EBay altogether in favor of Reverb.
Etsy is another case in point. They've been around for a while, but they offer a far superior customer and vendor experience within their fairly narrow niche of handmade crafts. I'm sure we'll also see custom car seller sites (most of the old ones are as antiquated and ugly as EBay), toy collector sites, all the things EBay covers in its one-size-fits-all approach.
EBay is lousy for window-shopping, but that's what collectors and nerds want to do. That's where the disruption will happen.
