All Disruption and No Nurturing Leads to Half-baked Solutions

In Tony Fadell's announcement that he is leaving Nest, he said (emphasis added):

Although this news may feel sudden to some, this transition has been in progress since late last year and while I won’t be present day to day at Nest, I’ll remain involved in my new capacity as an advisor to Alphabet and Larry Page. This will give me the time and flexibility to pursue new opportunities to create and disrupt other industries – and to support others who want to do the same – just as we’ve done at Nest. We should all be disrupters!

The trouble with focusing on disruption, and indirectly saying everything else is a lesser cause, is that you end up with a bunch of crappy, half-baked solutions. Transforming the world requires Crossing the Chasm that separates the small populations of innovators and early adopters to the far larger populations of early and late majorities. It is only once you reach these populations that transformation can truly occur. Crossing that chasm takes patient nurturing of the technology, and that may take years and seem boring to a disruptor like Fadell.

ArsTechnia's article Nest’s time at Alphabet: A “virtually unlimited budget” with no results wrote:

Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That's all.

Well, actually it yielded more - a major safety recall of its thermostat and disabling of one of its major features, shutting down the Revolv servers effectively bricking customers' $300 devices, and what felt like a never ending stream of bad press tarnishing the Google/Alphabet brand.

Tony Fadell and the tech industry in general need to stop worshipping disruption and also focus on nurturing the new technologies until they can cross the chasm and truly transform the world.