Strategic Management Case

I envision about 15 minutes spent on each of the first five questions and about 45 minutes spent on the last one.

Short Answers

1. What factors do you think enabled Sega to break Nintendo's near monopoly of the U.S. video game console market in the late 1980s?

2. Why did Nintendo choose not to make its early video game consoles backward compatible? What were the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy?

3. What strengths and weaknesses did Sony have when it entered the video game market in 1995?

4. What strengths and weaknesses did Microsoft have when it entered the video game market in 2001?

5. In what ways did Nintendo's Wii break with the norms of competition in the video game industry? How defensible was its position?

Long Answer

6. Comparing the deployment strategies used by the firms in each of the generations, can you identify any timing, licensing, pricing, marketing, vertical integration, or distribution strategies that appear to have influenced firms' success and failure in the video game industry?