UncleScrooge said:
No, he actually didn't. That was no magic, Iwata simply followed two very influential business theories and he openly stated so. ust look at these two books: --> Blue Ocean Strategy (DS followed this guideline) deals with the problem of direct competition (red oceans) and how to avoid competition by creating new markets (blue oceans). Nintendo followed this strategy because of the PSP and the threat it represented! --> The Innovator's dilemma. This one deals with disruptive technology. And Nintendo cited this work sooo many times in 2005 and 2006 that it still baffles me how all those awesome gaming "journalists" never even bothered to read the book and explain the success of the Wii. Instead we got all that "casual gamer" crap lol. I've mentioned those books dozens of times in these forums but no one seems interested in reading them. Just read them and it'll be like a 1:1 representation of the things Nintendo did with the Wii and DS. The Innovator's dilemma at times sounds like it was written because of Nintendo, so uncanny is the resemblence. These theories also perfectly explain the success of the iPod, iPhone, iPad (Steve Jobs called the latter one the most influential book he had read in his life), why the NES won against personal computers, why Nintendo failed with the N64 and Gamecube (and currently the Wii U) and why the 3DS struggled in the beginning. |
I'm actually quite interested in the Innovator's Dilemma since I follow the work of the Clay Christiensen's (the author's) student Horace Dediu. An amusing anecdote is that Christiensen himself did not recognize the iPhone as a disruption initially, dismissing it as a sustaining innovation for the smartphone market. More recently he said he came to realize that it was actually disruptive as a portable computer rather than an expensive phone.
