What is Disruptive Technology?

Is on-line, on demand GEOINT a disruptive technology?

In his blog “The Fear of Adopting New Technology,” my colleague Pat Collins describes the innovator’s dilemma in a comparison of Oculus Rift and Atari. 

If you look at Atari as a video gaming tech company you might see that it wasn’t video gaming itself, but Atari’s mass-produced, easy-to-use and affordable gaming systems that really created a new marketplace. If that’s true, then Oculus Rift will officially become a disruptive technology once everyone brings their own Rift to the movies for 3D immersion. BYOR.

Similarly, I would argue that on-demand GEOINT analytics are not inherently disruptive but a pay-per-use metered-usage model that spreads the value of geospatially-derived information throughout a much wider and less specialized community certainly will be. Let’s say that a landlord needs to prove that his tenant is not properly watering his lawn as defined in the lease. The day that the landlord can easily order a lawn-health time-series imagery product from Google Earth and charge it to his iTunes or Facebook account, I’ll consider the industry disrupted.

What do you think?