Smashchu2 said:
1) Seeing as you think Nintendo is the incumbent, I think otherwise. Nintendo is described as a disruptor becuase they are disrupting the industry with a disruptive innovation (the Wii Remote). Listen to Scott Anthony yourself, a co-author for disruption. He pretty much lays out disruption for the video game market and implies that Nintendo is a disruptor, and Sony is an incumbent (..."new-market disruption" which targets customers who have needs that were previously unserved by existing incumbents.... Wikipedia) 2) What your doing is saying you know something, but not showing it. You also "claim" you know a lot about the counter attack, but you don't give any real evidence of it or say what will happen (anyone can say disruption will end if they abandon the strategy, DUH). And I must not prove Nintendo won't be disruptive a second time in a row because I just didn't state that, can't you read? I just wrote that nothing can grant it, it's quite different. Giving to my words a wrong meaning to prove your point proves yourself wrong, not me. And, I'll write it again: next gen nothing can grant Nintendo will be able to release something with the same disruptive potential of Wii, surrendering to Wii2/Zii/Whatever without fighting and before even knowing what it will be and whether it will be successful or not doesn't make sense at all, it's just the wet dream of Sony and MS haters. And maybe of Steve Jobs. 3) And you never say why they can't. It's not that your saying they can't, your saying there is a possibility they can't. The difference is actually that one is an assirtive claim and the other one is walking on eggs shells as not to be wrong. In order to say what you did, you must also be able to say "Nintendo can't make a disruptive products," half of "Nintendo could make a disruptive product or they could not make a disruptive products." Which, when broken into two sentenses is "Nintendo can make a disruptive product." and "Nintendo can not make a disruptive product." Confused? Well, what it is saying is that you must beleive that both can be true, so you also saying they can't make another disruptive product. 4) So, I ask again, why can't they. 5) Now, since you claim you know so much let's put it to the test: How the the counter attack work? How will Nintendo avoid beeing beated by Sony and Microsoft, and how could Sony and Microsoft beat Nintendo? If you know disruption, you can answer this question. |
1) That was an exaggeration, I explained answering mai that I think Nintendo is currently disruptive in the portable market, but it relaxed a little bit on the home console. It's not behaving as incumbent, yet, but the risk is present, it's i the human nature to risk becoming conservative when you achieve the power.
2) No, that's one of my point: I can't know it, you can't know it and MS and Sony can't know it, so it wouldn't make sense for them to surrender without fighting. Obviously Nintendo already knows at least roughly what it will do, because development of consoles takes years and they most probably already started, but like MS and Sony, Nintendo too doesn't know the competitors most secret plans.
3) No, you still get the wrong meaning: saying that nothing can grant Nintendo will keep on being disruptive absolutely DOESN'T equal to say that it cannot, it just means that nothing can grant it for sure, very different. "Nothing can grant" means we cannot be sure, but the chances for Nintendo to succeed can range from 0 to just under 100%.
4) Again, "nothing grants it" doesn't mean that they can't. They can, but it's not granted. I DON'T say I'm sure they can't, I'm saying that it's not sure whether they'll succeed totally, partially or not at all.
Note: it looks like the issue in points 2 to 4 isn't about concepts, but semantics... About point 1, I'm guilty, I mildly exaggerated just to fuel the discussion... 
5) Possible counter attacks? Even this is not sure, but just like Nintendo MUST be reasonably sure, and appear so, of what it's doing, so MS and Sony must too. To have a chance they need two things to start: HW that works seamlessly and good SW running on it. When they got these two, they need a third thing: persuading people that their product is different enough, or a lot better, or both. Obviously also persuading people that their product doesn't lack anymore an important feature that was previously their competitor's exclusive can help. Yes, the borderline between counter-disrupting or just reacting as the incumbent normally does, so playing into the disruptor's hands is quite thin, MS and Sony must never give the impression of a "me too" attitude, or they'll lose, they must appear sure, to persuade the others, that what they are doing is different and better. Marketing and PR are heavily involved, but design too. And just as for Nintendo, nothing can grant they'll manage to stop disruption, but they MUST try. If they just fill the feature gap, they are dangerously close to play as incumbent, if they keep their differences, add new significant differences to their novelties and persuade people, they are closer to stop disruption. Not to win, even if they succeed, Wii remains this gen's winner and Zii still has high chances of being market leader next gen, but in a less overwhelming way.
BTW, the longer Sony and MS manage to keep Wii under 50%, the deeper the dichotomy between Wii and HD markets become, and SW offer is shaped by this and contributes to shape it on its turn, so again, the key for them is to make their use of motion control different enough, because just conforming to Nintendo would give the edge to the latter. But at the same time persuading people that their products don't lack anything anymore.
One last thing about going upmarket: are we sure Nintende really wants it? Attracting power whores to "steal" them from Sony and MS could increase Zii's costs more than what Nintendo could like. But even just attracting hardcores that aren't power whores requires at least additional investments on SW. Nintendo already has its hardcores, but attracting Sony's and MS' ones obviously requires something else, otherwise they'd already be Nintendo gamers. Nintendo main goals are to get huge revenues with huge profit margins and to be market leader, if trying to crush Sony and MS requires to significantly lower its margins, it will gladly leave costly minorities to them. This also because the potential world market is still huge, a lot bigger than getting a bigger share of the current one, there are hundreds million possible future gamers to be conquered when emerging countries' average incomes will grow enough, keeping the entry price low is of the essence to arrive first on these new markets. But hey, even the current less expensive console, PS2, still has a luxury price for emerging countries middle classes income, so maybe it will be someone else, not Nintendo, neither Sony, nor MS, to conquer those markets. But apart this, upmarket is neither the only direction, nor the potentially most lucrative, Nintendo already won this gen disrupting and expanding the market, as long as there are potential new markets bigger than the existing one, it can be done again (and it's not about just expanding demographics cutting price to meet income, different countries, different cultures mean that different and new things must be done).
