Don’t you think it’s amazing? Look at this: In your own words, Sony is doing a defensive co-opt move, while Microsoft an offensive one.
How more by the book can this industry get? Everyone are doing exactly what Christensen defined. Hell, the results are also exactly what he said they will be, not surprisingly.
First, Nintendo pulls out a perfect low-end disruption, then a few years later, at the same time, one of its two competitors does a defensive co-opt while the other an offensive co-opt. Whether these too will be perfect is still up in the air (though as far as Sony is concerned the result isn’t interesting anyway).
Disruption has generally been confined mostly to electronics. Video games are not really in the electronic business. They are in the entertainment business. And there aren’t any entertainment examples I remember reading about in the disruption literature.
Nintendo is a master of business jujitsu. In 2006, Nintendo was said to be unable to compete and should drop out of the console business altogether. In 2010, Nintendo is dominating and their competitors cannot compete with Nintendo. What a turnaround!
And what is more interesting is how Nintendo successfully shifted the battlefield from graphics and processors to interfaces. This is important because Sony wants the battlefield to shift to who has the best movie playback (i.e. Blu-Ray) to Microsoft wanting the battlefield to shift to who has the best online “infrastructure” (i.e. Xbox Live).
This isn’t the first time a massive disruption occurred with video game consoles. The first time was over twenty years ago when American game centric computers were disrupted by a foreign game company called Nintendo. The NES nailed the Expanded Market and there was a Core Market. The Expanded Market were families and children who the game centric computers did not want or cared to sell. The Core gamers the NES was carrying over were the nomadic Atari Era gamers. The equivalent of the Virtual Console then were the arcade ports on the NES (games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong which had no business being on a machine made years after Donkey Kong came out).
The above is the equivalent to the ‘classic controller’ for the NES. Gentle reader, I gravitated to this controller because it felt more natural coming from the Arcade and Atari Era. ‘Crazy Japanese controllers’ were what the NES controllers were often called! Like the Wii, the NES controller changed everything.
Even the DS, that preceded the Wii, is very much like the Game and Watch, that preceded the NES.
The excitement of the NES Era was similar to the Atari Era in that gaming was growing as a medium. We had such hopes for the future! But then a fork in the road appeared. With the NES success, competitors arose. Nintendo chose to jump into the red ocean against Sega during the 16-bit generation. And this fight only brought heavyweight Sony into the console business to crush all console makers for refusing to expand gaming.
Nintendo is approaching a similar fork in the road again. Some will say that making motion plus games for the Wii means that Nintendo is jumping in the red ocean. This is not so. Nintendo must fulfill the consumers’ expectations of motion controlled games as that is why they bought the Wii in the first place. If Nintendo does not do this, Wii owners will not buy the next Nintendo console since they will not suspect Nintendo supporting its ‘feature’.
If Nintendo released a Wii HD, that would definitely be jumping into the red ocean. The wrong fork in the road would be a Wii HD. The right fork in the road would be to do something else to further expand the medium of gaming.
Malstrom's Articles News 