This does not seem in line with the understanding of the word used in The Innovator's Dilemma, the book that popularized the word in a business sense. Guyzero's response above matches much more closely to it.
Normally, I'd agree, but in the case of the iPhone, the disruption was more profound than simple off-the-shelf components.
I can go into detail, but the standard ideas for Disruption tend to be technical in nature whereas the iPhone was a profound multi-faceted assault on the world. There are so many elements of this attack, it's hard to know where to begin, but it was certainly more than just a newfound set of components (a lot of the iPhones physical technology was not new).
But, I hear and agree with your point. Guyzero makes a great post above and it's certainly worth reading :).
I had to laugh when I read this. How can I not upvote something so good-natured, especially when it's a response to blunt HN criticism like I delivered?
Re-defining what is a well-defined english word using hipster-startup-hack-bias is contrived and self-fulfilling. The phone caused disruption in the world, done, done, and done. Now quit trying to fit the word disrupt into every conversation. Products create a rift, or they don't. Products are worth their value, or they're not. There's no magical "disrupt" criteria to satisfy the startup hivemind rubric.
Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.
Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around here that it's become something of a pseudo-intellectual discussion starter.
While I agree that the term is overused, in its genesis of popularity, it referred to a real (and previously unnamed) phenomenon: wben an un-(or less-)profitable market eats a more-profitable one, such that players in the grown-up market are misled by listening to their customers.
If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.
And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.
