What is blue ocean strategy?

The core move: subtract, then add

Most strategy work is additive — match competitors' features, then add a few. Blue ocean strategy insists on subtraction first. Which attributes does everyone in the industry compete on, and which of those could you drop entirely?

Nintendo's Wii is the textbook case. The console industry competed on processing power and graphics; the Wii conceded both, decisively, and added motion control and a price point that put it in living rooms belonging to people who had never bought a console. Against a spec sheet it lost. Against the market it had invented, it had no competitor.

Why it's hard to actually do

Dropping an industry-standard attribute feels like shipping a worse product, because by the incumbent scorecard it is. Every internal incentive pushes back — sales will report losing deals on the missing feature, reviewers will mark it down, and the comparison table will look bad.

Tesla's direct-to-consumer model met exactly this resistance. Dealership networks were treated as a structural requirement of selling cars, and eliminating them looked like a handicap rather than a strategy until the economics and the customer experience proved otherwise.

The honest limitations

The framework is much better at explaining successes than generating them. Its examples are chosen retrospectively, and the four actions framework will happily produce a list of eliminations that just makes your product worse. There is no test inside the framework for distinguishing a bold subtraction from a stupid one.

The useful discipline it does provide: write down what your entire industry assumes is mandatory. Most of those assumptions have never been tested, and one of them is occasionally wrong in a way that's worth a company.