Since I can't link to the text of the book (and don't have my copy handy), here's a
New Yorker story on the piece:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...
'In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars.'
and later in the same article:
'As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties.'
and, finally, this gem:
'On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent.'
So he wrote a book on disruptive innovation, where his main exemplar was how Seagate et al were felled by small, agile innovators, and published it the year Seagate crushed the small, agile innovators.
The book is full of wrong (it's basically fairly accurate about how innovation gets stifled in companies that fundamentally aren't innovative -- companies driven by sales commissions for example -- but those aren't the interesting cases; Apple, Kodak, Polaroid, AT&T, Xerox -- the companies which ought to be the best examples of his case -- don't follow his storyline at all).