What Wii Can Learn From Consumer’s World
If you have a look at the current sales rank of video game consoles you find a product named “Wii” on the top. This is quite amazing because the Wii is slower as its competitors, it has much less features and the graphic is years behind. The little secret of the Wii is literally little: a ½ foot long controller whose position and angle is detected by the Wii and allows unprecedented ways to navigate in computer games. And that is fun!
Some people designing Terabyte data stores or programming high-end enterprise software will probably tell us that they have nothing in common with this nice after work fun. But maybe they are wrong.
Traditionally the market for video game consoles was focused on power users. Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox competed each other with high-level gaming machines brimming over with power. Nintendo’s Wii just left them behind in doing exactly what is challenging enterprise software today: they broad it to the masses. Nintendo followed the Blue Ocean Strategy. This means that they focused on people who were not the classical target groups of game consoles. This required a design which allowed people to play Wii games without having years of experience in using consoles. And this seems to work.
Though it is even possible to use SAP Systems via your Wii controller it will sure not be the solution for enterprise software redesign. It is the general idea behind the Wii which could be a model for enterprise software: Make it easy. Beyond that it is not a full redesign what has to be done: enterprise software is not easy. But it is the user interface which could get simplified and has to be renewed. Fortunately there is some other innovation that we could use in our domain to enrich the front-end. We are talking about Social Software.
It has been written much about what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software is. You could fill books with definitions. But the key factor is very simple. Flickr, del.ico.us, Wikipedia & Co. made the user develop from a passive consumer role to an active engagement as co-author of the World Wide Web. This key factor’s name is participation. The rule is easy: Success has who gives power in the hand of his users - power to produce content but also to structure and explore existing content in new, own ways and share them afterwards. Tim O’Reilly says „a platform beats an application every time”.
