I love hoegaarden, they have them at a specialty store near my house.

Anyhoo, I just saw your question, (editted in?)

movgin upstream means that you start witha  shitty product and refine it to be better.

Moving downstream means you take your brand name associated with high quality, and make a product that's shitty with your brand name.

An example of the first is the scrap steel industry of Japan. Japanese steel was buying American scraps. They developed these ovens that could refine the scrap really quickly, but it was scrap and shitty, but very very cheap and useful for small insignificant parts. American steel didn't have these furnaces and so let them take the market. However, the japanese furnaces were getting better and better and producing mroe and more and the quality getting better and better. And so every few years they were like, here's this new product that can replace american steel F, then, a new one to replace American steel E, and so on and so on until Japanese steel had cornered american steel.

In that case, both were moving upstream.

Moving downstream would be a company who makes high margins making a shittier product with their own brand, but at a competitive price, resulting in lower margins. It would be like an aircraft carrier maker using it's secrets to make commercial kayaks.

@both. You mean the steel grade and the furnace quality.

Examples of upstream (let's see if I get this): The 3DS. Starting from the DS line, a bas-de-gamme product of Nintendo's usual great quality, Nintendo ups to offer the 3DS, a more expensive and high-grade product with Nintendo's usual great quality. hmm.. confusing example.

Example of downstream :) Intel Celeron processor, under the Intel banner, offers the Celeron line of processors. Lower-grade, same name.

Ds disrupted not only game market but lots of others. If youre familiar with the popularity of pocket dictionaries andtranslators in japan they go for several thousand dollars. A ds translator software went for 300$.
Now, in ds they had graphically inferior gaming and really casual games like puzzles etc. Even thefeel of ds games feels somewhat limited. With 3ds, suddenly they arecapable of running a psp like monster hunter. It wont look as nice as a vita monster hunter, but for many it will be goodenough. This forces sony to try and outdo ninty by having better graphics but for most, the graphics isnt the issue, its for example, 3d.

Moving downstream would be like sony moving to match the lower grade games

Scratch the last sentence.
downstream would be like what you suggested with intel. Correct.

The intel example is kind of weird actually. In theory its downstream but in practice its just undercutting

k! @bold. But what did the sentence mean, could you elaborate?

Also, I think Sony totally should move downstream SW wise (offer less prestigious high production value games), or even 3rd parties should. That would not only increase SW output, but it would reduce costs and it's goodenuff like you said. Such games also generally have more appeal than high-realism games.

Now you lost me. :) Go on...

Vita isn't anything like the Wii. For one, people actually bought the Wii. And it had games. More importantly, it actually was disruptive.

Vita isn't disruptive. It's the opposite of disruptive. It's exactly what everyone expected a PSP successor to be, nothing more, nothing less. It's further evidence that Sony doesn't get the handheld market. PSP had minis. No one talks about them, but they were there. It also had critically acclaimed games. Peace Walker may have bombed on its face outside of Japan but you can't say the games weren't there. Social integration and apps are not unique to the Vita.

I'm a claude, and I didn't read the thread

there is no gimmick on the vita in the year 2012......... but 3DS is still gimmicky with the 3D though.