Talk:Blue Ocean Strategy/Archives/2012

Criticisms

I recently removed the following criticism, which I believe is the contributors original ideas and are non-verifiable via any other primary or secondary sources. Below, I present a short clarification to justify that criticism is not sound enough.

"Many of the principles they claim unique to Blue Ocean Strategy had been already proposed by Swedish professors Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom in their 1999 book "Funky Business". For example, "competing factors" in Blue Ocean Strategy are similar to the definition of "finite and infinite dimensiones" in Funky Business. Just as Blue Ocean Strategy claims that a Red Ocean Strategy does not guarantee success, Funky Business explained that "Competitive Strategy is the route to nowhere". Funky Business argues that firms need to create "Sensational Strategies". Just like Blue Ocean Strategy, a Sensational Strategy is about "playing a different game" according to Ridderstrale and Nordstrom. Ridderstrale and Nordstrom also claim that the aim of companies is to create temporary monopolies. Kim and Mauborgne explain that the aim of companies is to create blue oceans, that will eventually turn red. This is the same idea expressed in the form of an analogy. Ridderstrale and Nordstrom also claimed in 1999 that "in the slow-growth 1990s overcapacity is the norm in most businesses". Kim and Mauborgne claim that blue ocean strategy make sense in a world that supply exceeds demand."

• First of all, Blue Ocean Strategy does not claim uniqueness of any ideas presented. It is about whats and whys and hows of creating new marketspaces. It reports patterns extracted from successful market creating moves studied within the scope of the underlying research. Many of the patterns reported, ofcourse, are related to concepts discussed elsewhere and published in previous books. The main point is that Blue Ocean Strategy discusses the market creating moves in the whole totality ( strategy formulation and strategy execution )and presents systematic theory and methodologies for minimizing risks involved in this creation process.

• Secondly, The underlying concept of Blue Ocean Strategy was published for the first time in 1997 in the HBR Classic article, "Value Innovation : The Strategic Logic of high Growth". Funky Business , as the contributor mentions , was published in 1999, which is 2 years after the authors' first HBR article on the topic.

• Blue Ocean Strategy does not say anything like "Competitive Strategy is the route to nowhere". In contrast, the authors argue that competitive strategies will continue to play an important role, however , for sustainable profitable growth a balance has to be found between red ocean and blue ocean strategies. Blue Ocean Strategy is supposed to complement competition based strategies to complete the strategy picture , instead of rejecting them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thinkingblue (talk • contribs) 06:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

This seem like a fair rationale, although I would disagree with your last point - both Kim and Maubourgne have often and vociferously criticized traditional competitive strategies. While they may not have used the exact words "route to nowhere" they have said that in many other ways. Of course to sell books, they will need to differentiate their product ;-) Mattnad (talk) 14:29, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I recently re-inserted the changes deleted by Mattnad. The purpose of Wikipedia is to enlighten the reader. Statements like if "the writer has a problem" with the issue of "licensing should take it up with the authors" does not fly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.82.80.200 (talk) 04:21, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, how about you added un-cited, unsourced claim about intellectual property ownership that seem more like a legal complaint than an attempt to explain the book. See WP:RS. Also your IP address is from Malaysia. Could you explain how you came by this information and whether or not you are an independent writer or somehow affiliate with the university. See WP:COI. At any rate, we will need a verifiable source for these claims. Mattnad (talk) 08:07, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Articles for Deletion debate

This article was redirected to Sustainable competitive advantage as a result of an Articles for Deletion debate. The discussion can be found here. -Splash^talk 01:53, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

What happened here? It appears to have been OK'ed for the deletion and redirect two years ago, yet this ad of an article is still up. Manys (talk) 22:28, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

I can't say why it wasn't redirected back then, but we'd need to revisit that again given the popularity of this book since that debate. If you'd like to re-open the discussion, go for it, but I'd argue that this book is notable, if only for the authors' ability to sell books. Mattnad (talk) 22:57, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

This article is about a non fiction book.

re-instating the redirect

It was decided by AfD that this article should be redirected. (See above comment) See WP:UNDEL for more information if you think the redirect was in error. Amalas =^_^= 03:03, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Blue Ocean may be a book title and a business buzz word, but it is notable

When I Googled "Blue Ocean Strategy," restricting the search to .org .gov and .edu domains, I got 35,000 hits in .org, 750 in .edu, and 18 in .gov. (175,000 in .com with "Amazon" and "Barnes" suppressed).

Based on the same logic, the article on An Inconvenient Truth would be deleted and redirected to Global warming —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bridgman (talk • contribs) 16:41, 22 March 2007 (UTC).

This book has taken off in the business book market, and is on the lips of product management people in [dying] businesses everywhere. It has become a keyword in and of itself, as in "what is your blue ocean strategy?" "do you have a blue ocean strategy?" and "how are we going to establish our own blue ocean strategy?" (followed, of course, by some justification of how whatever it is that you're already doing is somehow a blue ocean strategy, but I digress). Cleduc 23:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Further analysis of the Nintendo Strategy

Although briefly mentioned I think a further analysis of Nintendo and its current strategy, as it relates to the concept of Blue Ocean strategy might help to improve this article.

Agree? Disagree? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.22.167.103 (talk) 06:57, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

It wouldn't hurt to expand this. I believe earlier versions of the article had more information, but they were lost during various edits. I do find it amazing that after all of these years that BOS/Value Innovation has been around, we have only 1 (one) published success by a company that said they applied the theories to achieve their goal, rather than the professors claiming other, previous successes were example of Blue Ocean Strategy.

I once saw Maubourge answer a question about "any successful application of their theories". She said there are, but confidentiality agreements prohibited her from talking about them. This was a few years ago, so things could have changed and perhaps she has examples now.

I think the article would be well served by finding other success stories like Nintendo. I don't like criticism section being larger than the other sections. Mattnad (talk) 18:14, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

It's likely worth noting that the Microsoft Entertainment division is turning a profit now. There are quite a few articles on this from recent months online. This includes the Xbox 360 portion of the company. It is not clear that the 360 itself incurs any sort of loss in its manufacturing at this point. Perhaps stating "at launch" would be more accurate. In addition, this concept seems incredibly broad... couldn't one argue that Xbox LIVE managed something similar that would fall within this strategy? Nintendo (and Microsoft and Sony) clearly don't follow this marketing system fully regardless.

Yes BOS is very broad. It can be adapted to take credit for virtually any success, and of course there are no failures attibuted to the concept. It's perfect! Mattnad (talk) 22:34, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me with a little legwork it'd be pretty easy to find some good blue ocean failures - "the product was perhaps ahead of its time" kind of failures. Tempshill (talk) 02:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

BOS has spawned many consultants who sell the "how to" to enterprises looking for a silver bullet to their challenges. I know there are many companies have tried this and failed. But people brag about success and sweep failures under the rug. And to my knowledge Chan/Maubourgne have never tracked failed attempts. This is one of the key criticism of their work. In the end, I think the book has value if it encourages companies to systematically examine their business and their opportunities but that's no different from applying Porter or Christensen. Mattnad (talk) 12:12, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

The reason Nintendo should be cited and Microsoft should not is that this is an article about blue ocean, and supposedly Nintendo executives were influenced by it when deciding to create the Wii product. By the way, sources should be found that confirm this - right now it's just shown as an example. Tempshill (talk) 02:10, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

An article citing Nintendo specifically saying they're using the BOS is in the following link:

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/02/07/xbox-ps3-revolution-cx_rr_0207nintendo.html%0D%0D

64.231.248.85 (talk) 14:27, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's another: http://www.cnbc.com/id/31084652 --Hakanai (talk) 21:27, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Recent infusion of BOS-Speak

I'm a little concerned that some editors are trying to introduce a lot of promotional spin and BOS jargon into this article. In my view, the purpose of this article is offer a clear, concise and cogent explanation of Blue Ocean Strategy. Infusing the article with self-referencing jargon does not help the reader. While the professors may want a purity in how every term is used, that is most important for the book and not an article that tried to quickly summarize the concepts and critiques. The book is full of the the special BOS language and that's the best place for it. As for the PR spin "Record breaking" etc. etc., well, please leave that for the Harvard Business Press website. Mattnad (talk) 14:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Wii Supply Citations Needed

A part of the article mentions Wii has faced supply limits and had to ramp up production. I found a number of articles about this but don't know how to do a reference in wiki language. Several of the articles in the search "http://www.google.com/search?&q=wii+supply+issues" seem to be relevant to the [citation needed] mentioned in Wii Supply. Can someone pick one and fix the citation thing? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.83.100.145 (talk) 11:54, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Not sure how important supply problems are. The section on Nintendo already mentions that it's popular, but the fact they they didn't have production capacity really reflects problems on their delivery - not Blue Ocean Strategy. If anything, it suggests that they were less strategic than the case has otherwise suggested.Mattnad (talk) 15:29, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Duplicate References

References #13 and #16 are same - Not sure how to eliminate one of them, and make a repeated reference of the previous.

S. Arun Kumar (talk) 10:42, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Done. See the article for the syntax - basically you add a reference name, then you reuse it as needed. Mattnad (talk) 11:40, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

May 2010

The introduction lines look strangely like an advertising or a promotional paragraph... But well, after having read the following lines ("Criticisms"), I just think it is the inherent weakness of Wikipedia, this lack of critical thinking. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.196.52.11 (talk) 13:21, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Well you know what they say about "people who live in glass houses"..... Mattnad (talk) 15:03, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

No, what do they say ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.196.52.11 (talk) 07:17, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

July 2010

This article seems like nothing more than inane marketing-speak babble. But I confess that I gave up after attempting to read the first few paragraphs, which were totally impenetrable. This article seems more like an advertisement than anything else and I vote for its removal. Mr. Shoeless (talk) 13:02, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, instead of removing it, how about taking a shot a making it clearer. The book is notable so removing an entire article seems a bit drastic. I agree it's not great and there have been some attempts to improve it, but the jargon creeps back in. To a degree, this article is a great example of how business books take established ideas and recast them with catch phrase to make a buck. Mattnad (talk) 13:27, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

November 2012

The article is extremely difficult to read. The sentences have very bad structure. Article may need to be rewritten and restructuring of the sentences would definitely be beneficial. I have already started the job. Senington (talk) 23:26, 13 November 2012 (UTC) Senington