It seems to me there are two components involved in being a successful disruptor:<p>1. Be competent at what you do.
2. Have your main competitor be grossly incompetent.<p>What this article and its successor indicate is that Netflix satisfied both of these criteria: when, in 2007, Blockbuster had a fairly sensible Netflix-style plan in place, Carl Icahn instated a new CEO who chose to completely demolish it. Had Blockbuster not done this, it's entirely possible Netflix would have not have had room to grow (as Lyft experienced after Uber launched UberX to muscle out Lyft's not-just-black-car model).<p>I feel that Hacker Newsies get a little wrapped up in the party line of libertarian economics being the ultimate meritocracy, ignoring that capitalism is essentially just an oligopoly with the meritocratic potential to fail only in the case of gross incompetence (which, incidentally and curiously in practice, happens on a fairly regular basis).<p>Also, I feel things will work better as we try to structure things in a way that disabuses ourselves of the notion that things are working the way they should. Companies still ask questions in the hiring process under the pretext that their employees should want to perpetuate their current operating procedure. Admitting that things are broken, even slightly, leads to smart, sensible people being cast aside, in favor of those who will blindly go down with the ship. This teaches the workforce to be more lemming-like, in order to be hireable.