Excellent piece of commentary over on gameindustry.biz discussing Apple’s disruptive influence and how their gutsy approach to product development is having an effect on how some other corporations do business… most notably underdogs like Nintendo. From the article (Link):

Both approaches, he noted, are aimed at bringing “disruptive” products into the market; devices which interrupt the standard progression of escalating technology by being more low-tech than their competitors, but innovating in terms of usability, pricing and broad appeal. The iPod has often been criticised on the entirely true grounds that it is less powerful, boasts less functionality and supports less music formats than rival products from other companies, but that’s not the point of the product.

The point is that it offers an end-to-end experience in hardware and software which is unrivalled by any competitor, which appeals to consumers far outside the gadget geek demographic who were the sole consumers of digital music players before Apple entered the market, and which is supported by a fantastic branding exercise that has made “iPod” into a generic term for all such music players.

What’s to say? If everyone understood that products are more than features that can be added to a tradeshow “sell sheet” or rattled off in a 30-second commercial, we’d not be laughing at jokes about all the useless buttons on a blender or the number of blades in Gillette’s new razor.