Blue Ocean Strategy interprets success stories through their lenses, being descriptive in hindsight about the successful business stories.
I am sure there are great examples to cite from the book. The compeling one is the story of “Yellow Tail”, how this brand managed to attract the noncostumer wine drinker to start tasting wine. Wine was perceive as a complicated and a upscale drink, thus putting-off customers to try wine. “Yellow Tail” managed to changed all this by marketing two simple brand names for wine- Chardonney and Shiraz. They then attacked the market with simple packaging- complicated jargons made way for simplicity. I totally agree with this story, but was less convinced by others.
The way the author claimed that the complication of finding a whole album as a big attribute that propelled iTunes to success. The author says that you can only find single-song-downloads, rather than the whole album as a put off to downloading. He then bite himself by saying that iTunes offer the freedom to buy one song rather than a whole album.
Bull, bull, bull…. Everyone knows how successful NTTDoCoMo is, Blue Ocean Strategy is simply explaining a phenomena. It claims that NTTDoCoMo created a paid-content mobile-download blue ocean. Everyone knows that, but please explain how they did it, and how others didn’t manage to. Why only in Japan, and why just NTTDoCoMo? One reason, says the author was because c-HTML was used rather than WML. c-HTML was the pillar of success? Err…..I think the reason they went ahead with c-HTML instead of WML was because the standardization of WML was slow and painful, and the japanese company decided to take it on it’s own and introduced it’s own standard. But to say that this standard was the reason of it’s success, that is taking things too far. And yes, how can you explain NTTDoCoMo’s failed venture abroad using the same philosophy?
How did the then-NewYork-mayor manage to reduce crime rate when everything was stacked againt him? Morales were low, crime rates were soaring, budgets were drained, but he did it. So did he do it with Blue Ocean Strategy?. Wikipedia cited that many cities in US had a drop in crime rate at the same period of time. Does it mean that all mayor suddenly had blue ocean strategy at that point of time? Freakonomics gave a better explaination- the abortion reason.
A very important idea of the book is to create uncontested market space, which means don’t try to compete in existing customer base but search for new one. I have to give credit to this idea, it’s very true, but not new.
I am sure this best-selling book has alot to offer, but is definitely over-rated.
Well, lets just say this book has its criticisms, echoed on the its Wikipedia article as well at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy#Criticisms .
Nevertheless, books like this are good for a little more than “entertainment” reading, and for some – inspiration, and definitely not as 100% text book or academic material that you can or should quote from so blatantly thats for sure!
very much agree with you, blue ocean just another crappy book. so regret to bought this