Wikipedia:Disruptive technology
Examples of true disruptive innovations, ie. innovations that are lower in performance and lower cost, succeeding are rare. Occasionally, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as cheaper, lower capacity but smaller-sized flash memory is doing for personal data storage in the 2000s) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology)