Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean BS Idea

If your empty ocean is real, company is coming. If nobody ever comes, ask why it was empty.

On the night of December 21, 2015, a rocket booster fell out of the dark over Cape Canaveral, lit its engine and stood itself upright on a concrete pad.

It was the first time anyone had landed an orbital-class booster. Nobody else on Earth could do it. That is about as close to a blue ocean as it gets.

How long do you think SpaceX had that ocean to itself?

I used to think about a year. I was wrong. The next company to do it was Blue Origin, in November 2025. Almost ten years.

Then the gap collapsed. By August 2026, China had recovered boosters two different ways, one caught in a net at sea and one landed on legs. Three newcomers in about nine months.

Hard things still buy time. That head start took rocket science and a mountain of money, and SpaceX used every year of it. Most of us are not building rockets. We will not get ten years. We will get months.

Founders love one sentence: "The best part? Nobody else is doing this."

I have heard it many times.

Here is a quick test. Name one product you pay for that has no competitor. How long has it been alone?

Hold on to your answer.

What Blue Ocean Strategy actually says

To be fair, Blue Ocean Strategy is not a dumb book. Two business school professors, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, introduced the idea in Harvard Business Review in 2004 and published the book in 2005.

In their terms, a red ocean is a market that already exists, where rivals fight over the same customers until the water turns red. A blue ocean is a market nobody serves yet, where competition does not matter because nobody is there.

Their core idea is value innovation: be different and cheaper at the same time, so rivals stop being the yardstick. Do not fight rivals for the same customers. Redraw the market.

That is good advice.

The authors never promised forever, either. Ten years after the original, they opened the expanded edition with a new preface titled "Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red." Their own 2019 teaching case admits that phones and tablets went after the Nintendo Wii's new customers, and calls the Wii U "a dismal failure." Nintendo recovered by moving again.

Yellow Tail, one of the book's best-known examples, went the same way. The Australian wine with a wallaby on the label landed in America in 2001. By 2005 the shelves were full of kangaroos, koalas and penguins. The blue ocean turned red, with cute animals on it. Yellow Tail is still a big brand. It is just not alone.

So the BS part is not the book. It is the popular reading: find a market with no competition and you are safe. The jacket copy feeds it, saying these moves often leave rivals obsolete "for more than a decade." That turns a method into a hiding place.

The clock keeps getting faster

Rockets are hard to copy. Software is not. Watch the clock.

Snapchat invented Stories in 2013. Instagram copied it in 2016, and within eight months its copy had more daily users than Snapchat's entire app. Instagram's chief executive openly said Snapchat deserved the credit.

Credit does not pay the bills. Snapchat survived. It just never owned Stories again.

Clubhouse had live audio rooms to itself for about nine months before Twitter started testing Spaces. Within about a year Facebook and Spotify had their own. In 2023 Clubhouse cut more than half its staff. The end of lockdowns hurt it too, but it never got its room back.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. Google announced Bard 68 days later. By mid-March 2023, Microsoft had a chatbot in Bing, and Meta and Anthropic had released models of their own.

Google and the others had been building for years. That is the point. The empty ocean was never empty. The competition was already in the water.

Three years. Nine months. Ten weeks. Three stories are not a study. But does the direction look wrong to you?

Twenty or thirty years ago, a good idea could hide, because money, talent, information and connections were hard to reach. Today they are far easier to find. If your model works, there is probably a smarter team with richer investors who can do it ten times better than you, and they can find you in an afternoon.

And now there is artificial intelligence (AI).

Not long ago I drew a circuit on tissue paper with a green marker. Wobbly lines. The kind of sketch that used to sit in a notebook for months, waiting for an electrical engineer to free up. I handed it to an AI tool. About 40 minutes of actual design, two hours in total with my questions, and I had a four-layer flex circuit ready for the factory. The boards came back in about a week.

That expertise took years to learn. It used to be a moat. Now, if you know what to ask, it is a good conversation.

Software is even more exposed. An AI coding tool can build you a simple photo editor (exposure, contrast and white balance sliders) in minutes. App builders now show off exactly that in their marketing. It is not Photoshop. But how many Photoshop features do you actually use?

AI does not make great software easy. In one small 2025 trial, 16 experienced developers working on big, mature codebases were 19% slower with AI tools, even though they felt faster. But a copycat does not need great. A copycat needs good enough, and good enough is getting cheap fast.

Sparta never had a moat

So you protect it, right? Patents. Secrecy.

I am a co-inventor on eight United States patents, so I am not against them. In drugs and some deep hardware, a patent can carry a whole company. But for most products a patent is not a wall. It is the right to sue, and suing costs money, years and attention you should be spending on customers. Meanwhile a smart team designs around your claims. For anything you ship, secrecy is weaker still. The day you ship, your product is on someone's bench, being taken apart screw by screw.

On October 24, 2026, Jack Dorsey posted four words on X: "there is no moat." Elon Musk replied: "Sparta never had a moat."

He has a point. For centuries Sparta had no city walls. Its soldiers were the wall.

That is how I see business. It is a war, with one difference: it never ends. There is no final battle. It is a forever hustle. You do not have to be the strongest army. You have to be the most agile one, because agility is the part you control.

Or think of driving. Say you have driven for ten years without one accident. Can you close your eyes on the highway for ten seconds?

Of course not. Your record is real. It buys you nothing for the next ten seconds. Success in business works the same way. You do not own it. You maintain it, every day, eyes on the road.

The popular kind of blue ocean thinking is closing your eyes because the road looks empty.

Why the empty water is empty

Ask a fisherman about the quiet spot on the lake where nobody casts a line. There is usually a reason. The fish are somewhere else.

The absence of competitors is not the presence of opportunity. Sometimes there is no competition because there is no demand.

In CB Insights' review of 385 venture-backed shutdowns since 2023, 70% ran out of money, but 43% cited poor product-market fit. In plain words: not enough people wanted the thing. How many of those founders thought they had found an empty ocean?

Now go back to the product you tried to name at the start. If an idea is good, someone smarter and richer will usually see it, faster every year. If nobody ever shows up, there was probably nothing to show up for.

Is there a third box? Only a temporary one: a head start. SpaceX had one. The Nintendo Wii sold more than 100 million units on one. A niche too small for big teams to bother with can be a fine business too, but that is a pond, not an ocean.

A head start is a lead, not a home. Sooner or later it is a red ocean, or it was a BS idea.

A red ocean is not a death sentence. It is proof that people pay.

What wins where people already buy

So stop asking, "Where is nobody?" Ask, "What do I have that the crowd does not?"

That is your unfair advantage, and it is rarely the idea. It is usually something boring and powerful: you sell better than anyone in the room, you already have the distribution, or you know the customer because you used to be one. This is where the book's real idea still earns its keep: different and cheaper inside a crowded market, not instead of one.

Then one more question. If your investors vanished tomorrow, would anyone still pay you? Starting lean, with real customers and real cash, answers that early. Investor money is not customer revenue, and your ability to raise money is not your ability to make money.

"Go big or go home" is a fair choice too, with your eyes open. Of more than 1,100 American tech startups that raised seed money from 2008 to 2010, CB Insights found about 1% reached a $1 billion valuation. Put another way, about 99 in 100 did not. Possibility is not probability.

Then ask the hard question: am I willing to fight for this for the next ten years, against people smarter and richer than me?

Do not answer it with words. Your calendar will answer for you. If you are doing the work every day, the answer is yes. If you are not, it is no, whatever you tell yourself.

Chasing empty oceans is one habit of what I call the 99% Club: the people who follow popular playbooks that sound proven, without asking how many of those who took the same route actually arrived. It is not a club you want to join. More on that soon.

For now, one question.

If a smarter, richer team copied your product tomorrow, why would your customers stay?