[krschultz]

That's not actually what Christensen was saying.

A disruptive product meets the needs of a lower price point customer. For these users, the disruptive product is sufficient. The established company has overshot what the mass market needs in an effort to get more value out of their best customers.

Typically then the disruptive product is much better in a different metric. In his hard drive example, as each physical size had a much higher capacity than was necessary for the average user, metrics such as speed or physical size became more important. In his excavator example, once every shovel could move enough dirt, flexibility, maintainability, and mobility became more important.

Cheaper is often a part of the whole thing, but just making a cheaper product won't suffice. You generally have to compete on a metric orthogonal to the metric everything is judged based on now.

CPUs are going through it, the average CPU was more powerful than what "normal" people needed about 5 years ago, so now we're in a race along the power consumption/thermal output metric rather than raw computing power.