Gary Hamel has often talked about the problem of “strategic convergence” where products become more and more alike as firms focus on a few dimensions. Big breakthroughs often come when a company finds a new dimension on which to innovate.
Perhaps the most important industry in the world right now is video gaming–it is setting the future of movies and television, of computer interfaces, and of education, and of–I hate to say it–warmaking. And raise your hand if you have felt that the lead players, Sony and Microsoft, are starting to feel pretty much interchangeable? The big point of competition these days is graphic rendering–especially the rendering of skin in “first person shooter” games.
Now if you don’t play games, what is the most difficult barrier to surmount? Using the controllers. And yet the game controllers for both Sony and Microsoft are nearly identical, and built for expert kids who can master four-button sequences while driving the small little mushroom thingy.
Well, Nintendo has moved ahead. Here in the news today is a new controller, aimed at making participation in games as easy as pointing a remote at the screen.
http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10579&filter=
Congratulations Nintendo. Folks were counting you out, and here you come back in, from a new direction, innovating in a new dimension.
This just might be the iPod of gaming, the innovation that lowers barriers to entry to a much larger share of the population, and wildly expands the reach and penetration of gaming.
