Blue Sky, Red Ocean
I became familiar with Blue Ocean Strategy in the context of Nintendo's decision to forego the "console wars".
Instead of pushing to design consoles with the fastest chips and best graphics, they embarked on quirky industrial designs and user experiences with seeming tangents like the Nintendo DS, the Wii, the 3DS, the Wii U, and the Switch. The big idea (as it was baby-birded to me via amateur videogame journalism) was that competing with Sony and Microsoft to have the highest-performance machine or the best-looking version of multi-platform games was a losing proposition. It represented competing in a so-called "red ocean" (as in, there's blood in the water). Why? Because there were already two well-funded competitors vying to sell the exact same thing. The best Nintendo could hope to do was be marginally better, despite being in a far weaker capital position, with less access to the top chipmakers, and with a stable of IP that didn't necessarily benefit as directly from better graphics. So they pursued a blue ocean strategy by creating bold (and occassionally bizarre) products that couldn't be compared apples-to-apples with the competition.
The rapid, unscheduled disassembly of Twitter-dot-com over the last six months
has resulted in an ocean of opportunity emerging. Tons of entrants are getting
in. Mastodon was already there. Hive was there for a couple weeks, too.
Journalists toyed with giving up the one thing they really care about—drip-feed
dopamine from constant notifications—to join Post.news.
Meta is apparently building a Twitter-like platform with ActivityPub support.
Spoutible is a thing, I guess. And this week,
everyone's talking about Bluesky, the open and federated but
nevertheless locked-down and invite-only Twitter clone that started under Jack
Dorsey Twitter and whose new app looks more like Twitter than Twitter does.
All these real-time, text-based activity streams are pouring chum straight into a deep red ocean.
But wait, there's more…