About a year ago, I read an excellent book by Mauborgne & Kim: Blue Ocean Strategy.

To make a long story short, a blue ocean strategy is to be opposed to a red ocean strategy or ocean full of blood. The blood comes from battles between competitors fighting for marginal market share points.

In a blue ocean strategy, a given company will differentiate by positionning right from the beginning on unexplored segments to create new markets & capture new demand instead of joining the red ocean rat race.

In a market apparently utterly dominated by Sony & Microsoft (vs. Sega & Nintendo a decade ago; Atari, Amiga, Amstrad & Commodore two decades ago), Nintendo just released its new warhorse. A warhorse that’s not going to have to fight too soon. Indeed, with its new product Wii, Nintendo aims at a dormant market named “none core gamers”. The “none core gamers” market is more feminine, less addicted & suffers lower switching barriers between games that big fans market. Hugely successful Internet companies like Boonty (see Boonty’s founder, Mathieu Nouzareth , blog over here) have been targeting the same sort of “Sudoku” players for several years.

I don’t know much about video games, and haven’t played games seriously for more than a decade. Back then, I was Super Mario Kart and Super Soccer’s king on my 16-bits Super Nintendo. However, the more I read about videogame market forces, the more I think of Nintendo as the perfect Blue Ocean Strategy come back, executing in my views better than Microsoft which positioned the XBox 360 (an excellent multitask platform from which you can do a thousand things outside playing games) against Sony rather than next to Sony.

My bet? Apple will enter the gaming market (remember Steve Job is the founder of Pixar) in the 5 years to come.

Addendum December 6th 2006: I just came accross an excellent complementary post on the Nintendo Wii, by Ed Sim. Click here to see by yourself.