According to an FT article published on June 6 2011 on page 24, confirmation was that the success of Microsoft Xbox Kinect controller was making "..the Nintendo Wii become a lot less relevant". As we know, Nintendo pioneered the concept of getting gamers off the couch and unto their feet, which in some cases led to physically fitness. Their sensor technology also made it possible for non hardcore gamers to love game console, helping drive the mass market strategy the console gaming market thrives on. Nintendo led the market when they first released the Wii console, making them a market leader, but guess they failed to act quicky with an upgrade or enhancement. Microsoft acted swiftly with a very innovative concept of doing away with the hand held hardware and went for total contoller held concept. Microsoft Kinect device was released in Nov 2010 and 8 months down the line it was confirmed to have sold about 10m of the device worldwide, thats an average of 1.25m per month. This will of course slow down in the next couple of months, but Microsoft is now expected to show off more games that uses the device in order to further drive sales.
Have learnt couple of things in the past few days, some of which are:
- Ensure that you own a larg proportion of the Business flow. What am saying here is that as a hardware manufacturer, ensure you have a market share in Software as well. Apple remains a good example here. It's just a matter of time before Google acquires a (pc or tablet) hardware manufacturer in order to further it's world domination.
- Be very innovative. Innovation does not just relate to IT sector. Apple in the IT sector does this very well to the extent that they can sell you sand as an innovative idea.
- Patents, patents, patents. If your idea happen to be a genius one, recommendation is to go through the pain of getting the idea or part of the concept patented. A dating website(yes, dating website) by the name of Eharmony took a patent (No: 6735568) around the subject of "Method and system for identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship". If you can't come up with all the patents, best you buy one, Facebook did just this, but acquiring relevants patents that belonged to Friendster.
- Security and compliance. Financial institutions are obsessed with compliance, as they know it comes at huge cost with hefty fine from the local regulators if they get it wrong. Unfortunately a well know brand by the name of Sony failed to secure(and encrypt) key customer database as a group hacked into the server and compromised about 100m customer information
