Before the DSi was announced, I made a post on DS Three saying that the third DS would aim for the ‘distant users’ as defined by the Blue Ocean Strategy. The post was pretty much right on except for the part about the GBA attachments (whoops! Didn’t expect GBA slot to be taken out).
A couple of quotes of what was said in “DS Three”:
Phase three is all about the product becoming a tool for such a non-customer. This means the DS will be given non-gaming additions. This is not unlike the Wii having a Weather Channel and News Channel, for example.
and
Music playback and likely firmware that allows it to be used as a tool, such as a cookbook or a navigation guide in airports and other areas, fit the ‘distant user’ very well. People could buy the DS as a tool for those things and get into gaming in a more roundabout way.
All this matched the purpose of the DSi perfectly. NOA announced cooking software to be able to be downloaded into DSi as well as the two earlier Brain Age games.
Doublesix’s Brooksby has the right reaction in saying,
Brooksby went on to explain that the additions didn’t put the handheld at risk of becoming less of a games machine, saying that the multimedia functions could be used to develop more innovative titles.
“I think it has a split audience anyway, but the vast majority of the people buying DS’s will think of it primarily as a games platform for some time to come,” he commented. “There are some interesting crossover opportunities that this could bring. It will be interesting to read more on the exact specifications and how featured the web browser and playback features are.”
DSi is clearly still a games platform but whose new features will attract those in markets entirely distant from gaming.
In the Nintendo Press Conference, Reggie confirms the DSi is a Blue Ocean product:
9:14: There are plenty of other competitors in a “red ocean” trying to make the best portable cameras and music players. Nintendo is just trying to make the DS the most fun for the most people possible.
DSi does not have the best camera or MP3 playback. It does not have the best browser.
Those who interpret the DSi as a competitor to iPhone or even PSP are very, very wrong.
(It still amazes me how Reggie will keep citing Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption in public speeches and how everyone will ignore them to say, ‘It is impossible to talk about Nintendo’s strategy!’)
9:15: The Nintendo DSi has not one but two different cameras. How you use these two cameras creates the difference. One will face forward from the hardware, the other points back at the user. A different range of photo functionality. Combined with onboard, real-time imaging software. Combine pictures. Distort faces. Graffiti.
9:16: The DSi can also serve as your music player — but again, with differences. The DSi will use the AAC format, so you can move songs from computer to SD card. The DSi has built in software that allows the user to control pitch, speed of AAC files. You can put in an audio filter — “You may have a piece of music where you want to listen to only the vocals, not the instrumentals.” You can fast-forward through a podcast. Play different features sped up or slowed down. Record your voice in the microphone and change the playback speed/pitch of that. All of these options are available on DSi right out of the box.
Nintendo views itself as a software and entertainment company. These features are in the same spirit as the Wii Weather Channel is. Wii Weather Channel cannot compete against the Weather satellites you access from webpages. But that isn’t the point. The point was to use the Wii’s capabilities, including its video card, to create a globe of weather where the user can zoom in and find the weather throughout the world. It wasn’t simply a Weather Channel. It was a Weather Channel with the ‘Nintendo Effect’. It may not be ‘better’ than a computer’s display of weather, but it is more fun. And fun is the axis which everything of Nintendo revolves around.
The cameras of the DSi are not to compete against iPhone’ s camera or other cell phone’s camera. While it can take pictures, the purpose is to leverage the gaming elements of the DS to put a ‘Nintendo effect’ on the cameras, to make it ‘fun’ just as the touch screen made the DS chat rooms ‘fun’.
The DSi music player shares that same spirit. It is not intended to compete against music players. While it can play back music, what it can do is put a fun spin on music playback that you don’t normally see in music players such as turning off the instrumentals to a song or turning off the vocals to obtain a different experience with one’s music, an experience one wouldn’t get from a music player.
These ‘fun elements’ of the camera and music playback are not games in any sense. These are the ‘white spaces’ Reggie has referred to. A ‘white space’ would be the cereal bar that is not a candy bar but not a cereal. It was nutrition on the go. These camera and music features are ‘white spaces’ as well that are between traditional camera, music uses and gaming.
On the Wii, the Mii Plaza would be a ‘white space’ as would the ‘Everybody votes Channel’ and that Mii Download channel.
Nintendo interestingly gave names to Christensen’s three customer groups of Non-customer, overshot, and undershot. They used the labels Core Audience, Expanded Audience, and Classic Audience. The Expanded Audience is obviously the non-customers, the core would have to be the undershot, and the classic is likely to be the overshot, in other words, the former and lapsed gamers. Remember that the ‘Core Audience’ are those who want gorgeous graphics and more sophisticated games as has been the trajectory for the industry over the past couple of decades.
Many are saying, “This was Nintendo’s real E3!” E3 2008 is still massively misunderstood by people. E3 2008 was a Declaration of War by Nintendo who very aggressively circled their wagons to protect their Expanded Market from competitors who, according to rumors, were going to release a motion controller of their own. If Nintendo lets Microsoft and Sony out of their box and into the Expanded market, Nintendo’s disruption fails.
While many will mistakenly believe that Nintendo ‘heard’ the cries of the hardcore and sought to ‘redeem themselves’ (let me barf over this casting the hardcore as some religious authority companies must ‘redeem’ themselves toward). What happened is that the urgency of the counterattack has faded away due to non-responses from Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft declared war on Sony, and sought no moves towards Nintendo’s market (Microsoft’s so called ‘casual games’ were equivalents of Sony’s Singstar). Now that the Expanded Audience is not threatened, Nintendo can go ahead to focus on more Core titles. Should the Expanded Audience be threatened again, watch Nintendo drop the focus of attention on the Core like a drop of the hat.
This conference was a more relaxed event. E3 2008 was a pre-emptive strike against a counterattack that never came.