Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company in Kyoto, Japan. It tried taxis, instant rice, and love hotels. Every diversification failed. Then an engineer named Gunpei Yokoi noticed a bored commuter playing with a calculator on a train and had an idea that would reshape a hundred billion dollar industry. Do not chase the most advanced technology. Take cheap, well understood technology and find a brilliant new use for it. He called it lateral thinking with withered technology. But the customer psychology tactic that made Nintendo untouchable was accessibility as a weapon. When Sony and Microsoft competed for the hardcore gamer with more powerful hardware, Nintendo targeted the people who had never picked up a controller. The Wii's motion controls turned a grandmother into a bowler. The DS touchscreen let toddlers play. The Switch made gaming portable for commuters. Every product was designed so that the barrier to entry was not skill or experience but curiosity. Nintendo did not expand the gaming market by making better games for existing gamers. It expanded the market by making millions of non-gamers into gamers.