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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Amazon vs. Hachette is increasingly one of those battles you'd like no-one to win.

The discussions around the conflict have, to me at least, shown pretty clearly that book publishing as it currently is isn't a model which stands up to too much scrutiny when you look at how well it works for anyone outside it.

On the other hand I think we'd all rather it wasn't Amazon, a company who many seem to like using but don't trust much further than they can comfortably spit a dead rat, giving it a kicking. The old metaphor about frying pans and fires springs to mind.

Maybe we just live in a more cynical time but it would be nice if our disruption was something people generally felt optimistic about.

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Disruption has always been the province of companies that played fast and loose with the rules and were generally not very nice.

I disagree. Disruption involves change which is often stressful and yes, many of those who are disruptive can play it fast and loose with the rules.

But being nice? I see no evidence that old businesses are nice (we're just more used to their nastiness) and I certainly see no case that new, disruptive businesses are any way worse. If anything I think back to the likes of Google in the don't be evil days - young idealists who just wanted to make the world better and would work out the money side of things later.

Even if that weren't true, I still want to be optimistic about change. I accept that it's not all great, that everything comes with a cost, but if you're doing something that's so obviously potentially positive, surely something is wrong if people don't feel good about it?

I don't think it's useful or accurate to attempt a value judgment on "disruption" in general. It means massive change, the results of which can and likely will be good for some people, bad for others, and neutral for some as well.

Being optimistic (or pessimistic, really) about such a broad concept doesn't make sense. Could positive consequences come out of any massive change? Depending on your point of view, perhaps, with exactly the same probability (undefined) as negative consequences.

Current companies' and industries' goodness or badness are almost always a matter of perspective (though some are easier to argue one way or the other, again, depending on your point of view). Removing or stunting them with a new paradigm certainly changes things, but rarely if ever in a black and white, "things are universally [better|worse] now" way.

In other words: disruptive innovation is likely not strongly Pareto optimal in most cases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

That's not to say it's not an overall improvement though.

Disruption is by definition not Pareto optimal since it is bad for those disrupted. What's your point?

Bear in mind this cycle:

Disruption starts --> Early Adopters modify behaviour --> If huge, global population adopt as well --> Disillusionment, new needs coming up --> New disruption would be needed then, but corporations are slow and clumsy and sometimes are not able to adapt as faster as the market does.

This is the case of Amazon as it's been the case of many more in the past. You cannot eternally grow without decreasing your value at some time, reformulating your value proposition and launching your new proposal to the market.

So this is normal to me. Nothing strange. What sounds weird to solve the problems they are facing is their new proposal: a non-online store :/

Wikipedia link for those who also had not seen the fire/frying pan metaphor: [1]. I'll be using this one! Nice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_from_the_frying_pan_int...

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