VHS, Blu-Ray and Wii – Inferior Technology that Wins

I’ve been following the remarkable success of the Wii.  It’s the oldest game system out there.  It has less storage, memory, and CPU power than its competitors.  It has poorer graphics too.  In November 2008 it sold 2,000,000 units while its next closest competitor, the XBOX 360, sold 836,000 copies (see 1Up.com’s article for more details).  It’s so successful that I’ve even heard folks discussing Sony pulling out of the market.  (I think this is crazy talk, but who knows…)  Why?  Let’s look at the other examples.

Blu-Ray’s success led to Toshibo pulling its HD-DVD offering when Warner Brothers announced they would only release their films in the Blu-Ray format (see this article on Home Theater View). Strange since if you look at viewer comments you’ll see most people felt sound and image quality were better for HD-DVD.

It’s the same story for VHS and Betamax (see WikiAnswers this time).  In all of these cases the format that won (or is winning) was the one that has the broadest adoption.

This leads to my very simple belief that the product that gets used by the most folks is the best, regardless of the specifications.

So how does this happen?  I think Scott Weisbrod does a good job in his blog  relating how Nintendo used Blue Ocean strategy to identify the key areas of performance that are making it the best game system in the world.  If you’re not familiar with Blue Ocean it’s worth the investment.  It provides a framework for identifying how to diverge from your competition that’s termed value innovation.  For me it’s a great tool that helps answer my favorite BI question, “Are you measuring the right things?”  If you’re not including adoption in your key metrics you may want to think about where Betamax and HD-DVD are today…

From Capability to Competency

I left all y’all (for those not in the know that’s the proper plural from of y’all used in Southern Illinois in my youth) hanging for longer then intended!  Seems like I need to pay closer attention to my own rants about sustainability!!!  So the sustainability cycle – projects, enabling, execution and process are things near and dear to my heart.  Here’s how I think about it:

 

What’s it?  It’s a new capability that you want to turn into a competancy that is maintained and grown.  It is something valuable that you don’t do today, but want/need to in order to stay ahead of the competition or turn the crank on earnings.

What I said in last post (with too many words) is that my experience is that most folks operate in the bottom two quadrants – “build it” and “deliver it’.  These translate to a project the enables a new capability.  The top two are where the value lies.  It is where some folk somewhere do something with the new thing and good things happen.  Its an important thing thing.  Until the thing is put to use it isn’t anything.  In the software world they call the thing that no one uses shelfware.  I think of it as I’ve-built-it-and-they-do-not-come syndrome.  In the new-to-me-but-really-is-not-so-new-news language of innovation there is an emphasis on understanding relevance, ownership and vision so the next it has a home and delivers results.

So how does this relate to business intelligence?  In an environment where information is used to support competative advantage this is the continuous cycle that goes on in order to mature the practice of data assisted decision making.  (Uh-oh, I’m going all wordy again!)  The elements of the BI equation which are data, analysis and action all need to be continually experiencing this cycle of developing new capabilities while using and growing exisitng capabilities simultaneously.  So what’s that mean?  Well hopefully next week I’ll explain!

The Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

I’m serious.  There’s a group in Michigan who’s working to fix literacy.  Check out the Michigan NCRC Advocates site which to the naked eye appears deceivingly simple.  If you’re not willing to make the one-click journey then here’s a video from there site that explains what they are up to,

There’s a lot of folks out there who are doing great work in this area, but this one really get’s me jazzed since you can see it…feel it working.  Even better (from my admittedly geeky point of view) is that it is operating at the intersection of innovation, collaboration, business intelligence and organizational effectiveness.  The site is being maintained and extended by (markedly) non-technical folks, its gaining impressive hit rates which may in part be due to the ease of access to information and its having visible results which you can see from the key metrics they have established and are publishing.

Think about the impact this elegant uncomplicated effort is having.  People, families are being moved from food stamps to fiscal stability.  From a purely economic perspective this is neat.  From a social perspective this is phenomenal.

The Michigan NCRC Advocates are cool.  The Michigan NCRC Advocates rock!  Go see the Michigan NCRC Advocates (site)!

 …and then tell me what you think…