I was surprised at Porter's position. The Internet has certainly caused chaos, if not disruption. And Porter's colleague at Harvard Business School, Clayton Christianson, who wrote a book on disruption, would most likely disagree with him. But the issue of whether a technology is disruptive is more than an academic debate. Michael Hammer and I first identified disruptive technologies when we wrote about re-engineering.
Disruptive technologies are the kinds of technologies whose impacts are hard to predict.
The light bulb, the telephone, the automobile and the computer are examples of technologies that have had profound effects on how we live. But at the times of their introductions, their impacts were seen as incremental, if not inconsequential. Only the most aggressive prognosticators predicted their full impacts, and sometimes their crystal balls weren't very clear. For example, futurist John Diebold first suggested that the impact of computers would be through automation and that machines would replace people. But the disruptive effects of computers have gone far beyond automating old processes and decreasing the number of people required to do a job.