Disruption Oversimplification: Is Search Taking a Hit?
September 13, 2011
Bear with me here: Techdirt has published “Intellectual Ventures’ Response To This American Life: Oh Those Crazy Reporters Don’t Understand Disruption.” In this piece, writer Mike Masnick criticizes this blog post at Intellectual Ventures: “Disruption Invites Controversy.” That post was itself a defense against accusations made in “When Patents Attack! Act One” by This American Life on NPR.
That’s a lot of back and forth. We’re not going to weigh in here on whether companies like Intellectual Ventures (IV) are indeed evil “patent trolls.”
What we take issue with is the philosophical view of disruption represented here. In this context, disruption is a development in a given market that forces all participants to change how they do business. In other words, progress. Disruption may be inconvenient, but hey, that’s life.
In the Techdirt piece, Masnick says of the IV post,
The entirety of the blog post can be summed up in IV basically saying ‘we’re just too damn disruptive for those silly NPR reporters to understand us.’ But they don’t refute or respond to a single allegation from the report. Instead, they just use the word ‘disrupt’ (or disruptive/disruption/disrupting) five times in a short blog post. If they truly believe that it’s just that their business is ‘disruptive,’ then they could perhaps explain why IV patents of extremely questionable quality are being used to pressure tons of companies into paying large sums of money.
The point of view behind this assertion has the same problem as IV claiming credit for bringing disruption to the patent industry: disruption is not caused by one factor. We think it just looks that way and this outlook is a facile way to come to grips with events otherwise difficult to explain.
In search, for example, the disruption is the shift from search as the main event to more of a utility or tool function. The more significant shift is like the Exalead move to search based applications. Such shifts aren’t necessarily good or bad, just inexorable.
It’s tempting, especially in this sound-bite world, to simplify complex issues. However, such attempts only serve to confuse matters further.
Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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