> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kaitlinquinn.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Big Tech, what are we actually disrupting? - URL: https://www.kaitlinquinn.com/blog/big-tech-what-are-we-actually-disrupting/ - Published: 2026-09-03T18:56:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T18:56:27.000Z - Description: TL;DR: Big Tech has spent years celebrating disruption, but too often the result is more change for the people doing the work, not better work. - Author: Kaitlin Quinn - Tags: groundtruth, public-health For more than a decade, technology has taught us to admire disruption. We celebrate disruptors, evangelize new technologies, accelerate innovation, transform digitally, and scale whatever can be scaled. The language implies that movement itself is evidence of progress. I think it is worth asking a more careful question: **is the disruption we are creating actually helping the people we serve?** Changing a product is easy. So is changing a pricing model, launching another platform, adding a feature, acquiring a company, or announcing a new strategic direction. All of those things create movement, but movement and progress are not the same thing. Sometimes the person experiencing all that innovation is simply trying to do their job, and every new login, migration, workflow, subscription tier, and implementation becomes another thing they must absorb before they can return to the work the technology was supposed to support. ## When movement starts masquerading as progress I do not think most people in technology intend to make anyone’s life harder. Most of the people I have worked with genuinely care about solving problems. But they operate within organizations with very specific incentives. Revenue matters. Pipeline matters. Quarterly growth matters. Leadership needs something new to communicate. Sales needs something new to sell. Investors and boards want evidence of momentum. None of that is inherently unreasonable. But together, those incentives can produce organizations that become very good at demonstrating progress before they have had enough time to determine whether users are actually experiencing it. The idea gets sold, the roadmap gets built, the product ships, and the users begin adapting. By then, the organization is already moving toward whatever comes next. We call that velocity. I am interested in what happens when we value stability just as much. ## Stability is not stagnation That question has become more important to me as I have moved from corporate work into building independently. The change in methodology has forced me to reconsider what we casually call innovation. In technology, leaving something alone can look like stagnation. I am not convinced that it is. Sometimes the most useful thing you can give a working professional is a tool that functions reliably enough that they eventually stop thinking about it. That is not an exciting marketing message, but in infrastructure, public safety, healthcare, government, and other environments where technology exists in service of something larger than itself, it may be the more meaningful standard. The product is not the mission. The work is the mission. When technology begins requiring more attention than the problem it was designed to solve, we should be willing to notice. ## Growing up alongside the digital boom I am 33 and graduated high school in 2011, which gives my generation a peculiar vantage point on all of this. We grew up analog and became digital adults. We remember life before smartphones became infrastructure and before software changed continuously in the background. Then we entered the workforce during an extraordinary expansion of cloud software, subscription products, platforms, dashboards, integrations, and apps. Technology became more capable, but work also became more technologically demanding. Year after year, quarter after quarter, we kept adding more systems and more layers to manage them. New fiscal year, new strategy, new platform, new initiative. Always growing, always scaling, always becoming something next. At some point, I started wondering what exactly we were running toward. Especially in a small industry, the answer cannot simply be "next quarter." The people building, buying, implementing, maintaining, and using these systems are people we will continue working with for *decades*. Relationships compound. Trust compounds. Institutional knowledge compounds. Good systems compound. Not everything valuable needs to be replaced. ## What disruption actually looks like to me now My definition of disruption has changed because of that. I no longer think it is particularly disruptive to build a slightly different version of something that already exists and sell it under a new category. Real disruption is often quieter and more uncomfortable. It is asking why a system works the way it does when everyone else has accepted that it simply does. It is questioning a profitable business model when the incentives no longer align with the people it serves. It is refusing to reproduce a process just because it is familiar. Sometimes disruption means building something new. Sometimes it means simplifying something old. Sometimes it means giving something away. Sometimes it means deciding that a perfectly good solution does not need another feature. Actually disrupting a system requires a willingness to break from the patterns that built it. ## How that is shaping Groundtruth 911 Building independently has given me the freedom to examine those assumptions directly. I do not have investors demanding a growth curve or a quarterly earnings call to prepare for. I have experience, relationships, curiosity, and close proximity to the people I hope to serve. That means I can build slowly enough to notice things. I can put unfinished ideas in front of people. I can ask questions before deciding I know the answer. I can build free tools where they make sense. I can create spaces where people can share knowledge without every interaction becoming a sales opportunity. I can allow useful work to exist before I have fully decided how it should generate revenue. That does not mean I am uninterested in building a successful company. I want Groundtruth 911 to succeed and last. That is exactly why I am unwilling to confuse speed with durability. ## Maybe disruption deserves a higher standard I still believe deeply in technology and innovation. I believe extraordinary things happen when people question old systems and build better ones. But if we are going to call ourselves disruptors, I think the word should require more from us than novelty. It should require us to answer one simple question: **Did we make the work easier, or did we just make it different?** If we cannot answer that clearly, we may not be disrupting a broken system at all. We may just be creating more motion inside it. ## A note on the bigger picture These observations come from my own experience working in and around technology, but the underlying patterns are not unique to any one company or industry. Research in occupational health has increasingly examined technostress, digital overload, and work intensification as broader workplace phenomena. For further reading: - Borle, P., Reichel, K., Niebuhr, F., & Voelter-Mahlknecht, S. (2021). *How Are Techno-Stressors Associated with Mental Health and Work Outcomes? A Systematic Review of Occupational Exposure to Information and Communication Technologies within the Technostress Model.* [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34444422/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34444422/?ref=kaitlinquinn.com) - *Work intensification: A systematic review of studies from 1989 to 2022.* (2023). [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37781853/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37781853/?ref=kaitlinquinn.com)