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WHAT DOES ‘DISRUPTIVE’ MEAN?

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‘Disruptive’ is a hot buzz word these days. You hear TV commentators and politicians using the word ‘disruptive’ all the time, but it sounds like most of them don’t know what the word means. ‘Disruptive’ does not mean ‘destructive’; however, that appears to be what a lot of people think it means. An angry child smashing the family’s porcelain dinnerware is not being disruptive. He is being destructive. So – what does ‘disruptive’ mean? The word ‘disruptive’ has 2 very different meanings, one negative and one positive.

In politics, ‘disruptive’ usually refers to something bad. ‘Disruptive’ can describe a person who is undisciplined, disorderly, unruly, chaotic, or who just won’t play by the rules. For example, in the first presidential debate in 2016, candidate Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 22 times in the first 30 minutes of the first debate. Constantly interrupting somebody who is speaking during a debate is very disruptive, and in the negative sense of the word.

However, in high technology, ‘disruptive’ usually refers to something good. That is because ‘disruptive’ has a second meaning. ‘Disruptive’ can refer to something new, innovative, or groundbreaking that radically changes the way business is conducted or how a product or service is produced, displacing the existing way of doing things. I was thinking about this last month at the annual BoxWorks conference in San Francisco. During his keynote address, Box CEO Aaron Levie interviewed Brian Chesney, the founder of AirBNB. Both of them referred to AirBNB as a ‘disruptive business’, and it is. Mr. Chesney created a new business model for temporary housing that was cheaper for travelers and that provided new income for property owners. However, as a result of this, established hotels and motels lost a lot of business. This is an example of ‘disruption’ in the positive sense of the word. The next time you hear someone on TV using the words ‘disruptive’, ‘disrupter’, or ‘disruption’; think about what he means. If he is using the word in a story about a politician, it almost always means something bad. In high tech, it almost always means something good.

Auto Antonyms. There are a lot of words like ‘disruptive’ in the English language, words with 2 very different and sometimes opposite meanings. An auto-antonym is a word with 2 opposite definitions. My Uncle Maurice got me interested in auto-antonyms a long time ago. Consider the word ‘citation’, which is an auto-antonym. A citation can be a an award for good behavior ‘The Boy Scout received a citation for saving the drowning camper’ or a penalty for bad behavior ‘The policeman gave the driver a citation for parking in a bus stop.’ Words with 2 opposite definitions creates a lot of confusion and and sometimes start pointless arguments.

What Is More Secure: Cloud Storage Of Your Computer Files Or A U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex?

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SisterRiceAnswer: It’s your computer files. In February, 2014; Sister Megan Rice, an 84 year old Roman Catholic nun was sentenced to 3 years in prison for breaking into a nuclear weapons complex in Tennessee and defacing the secure area of the complex with anti-war slogans that she painted on the walls. The complex in Oak Ridge holds the U.S. government’s principal supply of bomb-grade uranium. Although heavily armed security guards patrolled the front gate, the elderly nun was able to enter the control center by going in an unguarded and unlocked back door labeled ‘Do Not Enter’, which private contractors apparently felt was adequate to prevent unauthorized entry. The contractors have since been fired. The government prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Sister Rice to 30 years in prison, but the judge sentenced her to just 3 years instead due to her advanced age, history of good works, and the fact that she didn’t take any uranium or plutonium out of the facility. Sister Rice’s story has been closely followed by the press in the Middle East. I think that if I was in Al Qaeda, I would find this story very interesting!

 

Box.com. 8 years ago, my nephew Aaron Levie, started a cloud storage business in my back yard, Box.com. (Aaron is actually my first cousin once removed, but I tell people that he is my nephew because I don’t want to have to explain to people what a first cousin once removed is.) Box.com has become the 800 pound gorilla in the corporate cloud storage market, with over 95% of Fortune 500 companies using it. Like a lot of successful dot-coms, Aaron started up on a shoestring, which is why he and his partners were living and working in my backyard cottage  for 10 months, from January to October, 2006. It was their first office as well as their home. I am sure that Aaron’s business would never have gotten off the ground if Box.com was as secure as Oak Ridge. So Yes, it does appear that cloud storage is a lot more secure than the government’s nuclear weapons arsenal.