“Good” Disruptive Design (Diapers.com) vs. “Bad” Predatory Design (Amazon.com)

and here's how it's done. When firms and individuals with true disruptive designs, by definition, "a product or service designed for a new [non previously purchasing] set of customers" are ready to sell innovations they have created, free market economics dictates the sale goes to highest bidder. Unless of course other mechanisms, something every 1st year MBA student learns about, are used to effect pricing. Enter the cut-throat landscape via How Jeff Bezos Crushed Diapers.com So Amazon Could Buy Diapers.com and we see how in the post Google age, no longer are the innovators the creators of value, rather aggregates of opinion are.

Competitors who don't have enough users saying a product, service, innovation or disruptive design is worthy, purchase opinion makers, aggregate users who instantly communicate via the new digital news-makers: Google, Yahoo, Bing and now fully funded image based news marauders Cheezburger who recieved 30M from Andreesen Horowitz . Need 10,000 "news" intenret indexible articles talking about a product or service that is amazing, valuable, popular? Then use Bezos's Diapers Gambit via his purchase of Diapers.com or loose that revenue stream to Walmart, by not acquiring opinion. Bezos's actions however not the way disruptive design was intended to create economic benefit for end users.

Bezos's "design process" of the Diaper Gambit unfortunately is not based on Clay Christensen's 1995 coined term "Disruptive Design"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation nor the progenator of the word "innovation" Joseph Schumpeter who defined how to create economic value through creating "the new" in his 1908 economic text "Methodological Individualism"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter#Schumpeter_and_innovation also ignored by robotics engineer Joseph F. Engelberger who asserted that innovations require only three things: 1) A recognized need, 2) Competent people with relevant technology, and 3) Financial support. Bezos's Diaper Gambit focuses on when product design, company innocation or new product development design isn't enough, it's opinion (real or imagined) that determines outcome - something every innovator and design disruptor firm must not ignore: free market economics vs. free market predators.