Live! disrupted the traditional single player experience with laggy online and crummy games (original xbox)

And BR is disrupting the DVD industry from the top-down by providing much higher end quality for a similar price. (BR players are nearing sub 100$, and the ps3 is what secured this "disruption?")
Also, the PSPGo thing with DD seems to be doing this. Smaller screen, limited capacity, niche consumer base.

In this article I'm reading, The Ipod disrupted mp3 from the top down, but satellite from the bottom up later on in the lifetime.

Also, I'm curious what happens when a disruptor faces "controlled environment". For example, it's hard to break into BR's market because it has contracts with all the major studios.

@theproff00

"It seems like all three are practicing disruptive strategies.
Sony with Blu Ray
Xbox with Live!"



A typical argument...

”It is quite simple. Digital distribution has no future because market research shows that people want to buy things on disk. Blu-Ray and its HD movies are so much data that they cannot be put on digital distribution… at least not for a long time. Therefore, the success of Blu-Ray means digital distribution is defeated, at least for a decade. Sony is a genius.”

Sorry, but you get an F.

”What! Why!?”




Disruption relies on certain rules which you violated. One, market research never reveals disruption until it is too late. One cannot analyze markets if they do not exist yet. Also, Blu-Ray can never ‘defeat’ a disruptor. The only thing that can ‘defeat’ a disruptor would be another disruptor. Blu-Ray is a ‘sustaining’ advance. It is better than DVD in many ways. But since it is just ‘sustaining’ and never ‘disruptive’, it cannot stop a disruptor simply because it is ‘better’.

All of those require extending the definition of disruption, they are not the strategy we are talking about.

Live! didn't disrupt anything, it may have had flaws but it wasn't aiming at low-end underserved customers. It simply provided a different service to single player games, and improved over time. If it was really disrupting it would have massive growth while the incumbent (single player and local multiplayer starts to stagnate and eventually decline). Over that period the Wii is what has had massive growth, Live! has grown but notso much compared to the industry as a whole. It simply doesn't fit.

Blu-ray is way beyond disruption. Disruption is never 'a better product'. Blu-ray is sustained innovation, it's the normal progression for formats to be replaced by better ones, not disruption. Niche is not disruption either.

Don't worry, it's not unusual to misunderstand disruption. Most people go away with a superficial idea of it, and think that they are being disruptive by making a 'better product', or something for a niche group. But it can be rectified by reading more about it.

^The disk isn't the disruptor.
The disruptor is everything that space is capable of providing. Entire seasons on one disk, multiple languages, BD-Live, self-updating content, region free, scratch resistant lining, slowly getting closer and closer to DVD player price.
In the future, exclusive content. Because BR is very hard to copy, more and more studios will prefer to sell on BR.

Or does that not constitute disruption? It seems like what Ipod did to mp3 players.

No. It's not a crummy product for crummy customers. It's a high end product for high end customers, pretty much the standard for sustained innovation strategies.

The ipod is a crummy product, it doesn't allow nearly as much control as an MP3 player(crummy product). It was for people who weren't able or didn't have the time (crummy customers) to manage their music collection the way an old MP3 player would. People ranted about the ipod when it came out, they acted as though people were only buying it because of "marketing". This is all totally typical of disruption.

iPod was a disruptor to CDs more than it was to MP3 players, at least from my take. BR seems more like a natural progression of increased specs, similiar to the jump from PS2 to PS3. If anything is going to be a disruptor in the film industry, it would likely be something involving online films, either streaming or downloads. Or maybe it's something else entirely no one has thought of yet. I don't think Blu Ray is a disruptive product though.

I think people get too caught up on the metaphors and miss the big picture about what the "Disruptive" strategy is all about ... "Disruption" could best be discribed as a methodology for creating a new submarket which you control due to the lack of competition.

In the videogame market there is a small segment of the population who has been heavily targeted for several decades and the potential total revenue growth from this demographic is very limited because the majority of them are already gamers, and they are spending as much time and money on videogames as can realistically be expected. Because there is such high competition the costs associated with developing and marketing a product to be successful to these consumers has skyrocketed, and the margins from the sale of products to these gamers has shrunk dramatically, and the only way for a company to be successful is to "Fight" with other companies over their sales which results in a lot of "Blood in the water" and "Dead" competitors.

There is also a second (much larger) segment of the gaming market who may (or may not) enjoy some of the markets that represent the main focus of the industry at the moment, but they're not entirely dedicated to it and they have time and money to devote to games in genres which are not being focused on (or even produced at all) by the major players in the industry.

Finally, there is a (once again much larger) segment of the (potential) gaming market who is being very poorly served by the current market and there is almost no interest in producing products for them. (the "Blue Ocean")

A disruptive strategy is when a company focuses on the broader market (the middle group in the discussion above) while starting to find ways to appeal to people who are not being well served by the market at all (the "Blue Ocean"). You can see this in Nintendo's strategy because most of their conventional games are focused on genres where games sell well but have little competition (platformers, adventure games, kart racers, puzzle games, arcade games, etc) while they are producing games which are very unconventional, and there are few existing games which can be directly be compared to them (Wii Fit, Wii Music, etc).

The next step for Nintendo in this strategy is to use the techniques that have been applied in the dedicated and broader markets to convert new and underserved gamers into more dedicated gamers, and to solidify their dominance within the market. You can imagine what Nintendo wants to do with the market they have grabbed is what EA did with the Sports game market in the 1990s; which is to become the highest quality and best known product in order to ensure that people see you as the only product to buy.

Why it is so difficult to unseat the disrupter is because they have already improved the "Quality" of their product (in the eyes of their consumers), built their brand, and made their consumer more brand conscience by the time you release your competitive product. It would be (a lot) like releasing a crime based sandbox game today and expecting to be able to compete directly with Grand Theft Auto.

1st P: Wouldn't single children, or rurally habituated gamers be the ones that were underserved by local multiplayer?  And wouldn't you say xbox has had massive growth from the 1st to the 360? I think it's almost triple the sales as before hasn't it? It seems that Nintendo just disrupted the disrupter right?

2nd P: I think the normal progression would have been upconverter DVD players. It was attempted and failed against BR.....hang on.... I see, they only disrupted upconverter player companies, not DVD,..right?

looking at this chart I can fill the steps:

Live:

starting from top left.

No, yes, yes, no, yes ("Jump in" sounds pretty urgent to me), yes=GO

BluRay:

no, yes, yes(soon), no, yes(HD is almost mandatory now), yes(exclusive HD content)=GO

Thanks everyone, so far, I feel like I am really seeing a new side of the entire console war. :P

i've seen many well thought out posts so far, but i'm still on the fence here.
these are all predictions based on how the market has behaved so far. they seem accurate, but only time will tell. this isn't a natural process like the water cycle or photosynthesis.

The important thing to remember, i think, is to keep an open mind to every possibility, regardless of how unlikely one may seem. i, for one, doubt sony's and microsoft's motion controls will catch on (this generation, at least), but it is still slightly possible.

as for me, i'm going to enjoy all of the great new software coming