Disruption is the new Disintermediation

The impetus for the latest round of Microsoft naysayers was a pair of memos from Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates. Dave Winer published the complete text of both documents, and they are well worth reading. What I found most interesting is the way they captured the current "Disruptive" zeitgeist. Ozzie's October 28th memo is titled "The Internet Services Disruption," and Gates declares to his troops that "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," in his response on October 30th.

There is clear evidence on Blogpulse that "Disruptive" is gaining favor among the blognoscenti.

Wikipedia tells me that "disruptive technology" was coined by Clay Christensen (from Harvard of course) in 1997 during the run-up to the Web 1.0 boom, but it looks like it will reach a peak with Web 2.0. My own Harvard training tells me that this phrase is a terrible example of technological determinism. Technologies don't "do" anything, people do things with technology, if a host of circumstances are just right. I also can't help but notice how gendered a term this is. Women cooperate, men disrupt, like a bunch of little boys on a playground smashing each others forts.