New Installment in Malstrom's "Disruption Chronicles"

Malstrom Delves Deeper into the Blue Ocean of Disruptive Technology

Fascinating series of essays continues with Disruptive Storm

I happened upon Sean Malstrom's site today and found out he added a new piece to his series of articles about the Wii and disruptive technologies. The new essay is called "Disruptive Storm" and it's comprised mostly of quotes from business leaders and market scholars in addition to giving examples of previous disruptions. You can read it here.

These essays are really long, but I can't stress enough how interesting they are –even if it isn't video games you're interested in. If you didn't catch it when I blogged about Malstrom's article, "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy", these are a series of essays explaining what Nintendo is hoping to accomplish (and, so far, succeeding) with the Wii:

"While the Wii may be inferior in graphics and horsepower, it contains attributes that fringe customers value such as cheaper, smaller, simpler, and frequently more convenient to use. Due to the experience and investment, the developers of disruptive technologies will always take over the older markets."

"Well managed companies fail because the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also makes it extremely difficult for them to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets."

This may be of interest to those of you in our mass communications course when we're asked: why are newspapers giving way to the internet, blogging, and beyond? The internet has been a disruptive technology to more than one industry. These articles are great for understanding this concept.

What do you think of disruption theory? Do you think Nintendo's plan with the Wii is working, or is the real revolution a ways off?