There is one really great thing about your major competitor. You know who they are.

Increasingly it would seem that the competitor that will put you out of business is the one you don’t even know about. As Bill Gates famously commented, Microsoft’s biggest threat is a guy in a garage somewhere inventing something that will put them out of business.

With this in mind you may recall our previous comments about the rise and rise of the mobile phone and the disruptive impact it has had on the GPS and digital camera markets. In this we mentioned that the greatest threat to these businesses came not from within their market, but from the adjacent mobile phone market.

• The GPS device market is now in free fall as phones grab more and more share (www.loopt.com), and
• The largest manufacturer of digital cameras is now a phone company

Well this looks like it is set to continue according to a recent article in the Melbourne Age. Now it would seem games manufacturers are starting to feel the heat as more and more games move onto mobile phone platforms. Despite Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all have hand held games devices for some time, the outrageous success of Apple’s Apps store business model is starting to tip the scales in favour of the mobile phone.

There is something to be said for assessing ‘the business you are in’ from a customer perspective, rather than from your perspective. Rather than focusing on a product/technology, Apple are busy building and supporting a customer platform. In doing so they are showing that the consolidation of multiple solutions onto one platform produces greater value. By recognising that the mobile phone is the only truly indispensable mobile device and then using this as a platform to launch more apps, Apple has opened up a new segment for their iphone platform - the mobile game player.

What this allows is a complete disruption within the games industry - changing the way developers are remunerated, the way people play games, where they play them and how they purchase them. The difference between product disruption, where a new product may disrupt one part of the value chain, and a new platform is that only a platform has the potential to disrupt the entire value chain.

The trick is to ensure that your company is the one with the disruptive platform. The risk is being blind sided by a platform that puts you out of business.