(Bloomberg View) — These haven't been the best of times for Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. Yeah, it's more famous than ever, but it's become so widely used and misused as to invite a major backlash, and occasionally drive even the Harvard Business School professor and his faithful disciples to protest. There is also, for all the talk, little evidence of a wave of disruptive innovation right now in the macroeconomic data. Worst of all, the most remarkable business story of the past decade-plus, the rise and continued supremacy of Apple, has come in the face of repeated warnings from Christensen that this whole iPhone thing was bound to fail.

So it's nice for those of us who value Christensen's work to see a market still following the script laid out in his 1995 Harvard Business Review article, "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," and subsequent book, "The Innovator's Dilemma." It goes like this: an upstart product maker or service provider rolls out a new technology to a low-end or niche market that the incumbents ignore, and steadily moves upstream to eat those incumbents' lunch. That's what's been happening in cloud computing services, with the upstart being Amazon. This is from the fascinating new Bloomberg Business account by Jack Clark and Ashlee Vance (in the following passage "Jassy" is Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services): 

"Amazon began using its improved system internally and saw that it could go after a much wider audience than a handful of retailers. "We wanted to enable any individual, in his or her dorm room, to have the access to the same price and cost structure and scalability and infrastructure as the largest companies in the world," Jassy says. Other companies ignored this market and instead pointed their products at top executives in large, traditional business organizations.

Still, Amazon is No. 1 (with 28 percent of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services to Microsoft's 10 percent, IBM's 7 percent and Google's 5 percent, according to Synergy Research Group), and its cloud operation "may be the fastest-growing corporate technology business of all time," Clark and Vance assert. Amazon is planning to break out the numbers for its cloud business for the first time in its earnings report on Thursday. One analyst estimates that Amazon Web Services' annual revenue will come in at about $6 billion; one presumes there will be no profits yet, because that's just not the Amazon way.