<story><title>Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)</title><url>https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-philosophy-lateral-thinking-with-withered-technology-bac7257d8f4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s important to also understand that, despite broad name recognition, Nintendo isn&amp;#x27;t a &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; company in the way that Sony or Microsoft is. Their entire corporate revenue for 2019 was about $11b USD with about $2.3b USD in operating income. We regularly talk about startups here that are technically larger.&lt;p&gt;What Nintendo&amp;#x27;s philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft&amp;#x2F;Sony where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech.&lt;p&gt;While Microsoft and Sony&amp;#x27;s revenues per platform are around the same, their console businesses are small pieces of &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; large organizations -- with all the ossification that comes from being huge companies.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the &amp;quot;toy&amp;quot;). Nintendo&amp;#x27;s focus is on how to create this play experience, and what&amp;#x27;s the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)</title><url>https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-philosophy-lateral-thinking-with-withered-technology-bac7257d8f4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>taneq</author><text>&amp;quot;Withered&amp;quot; is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they&amp;#x27;re massively widely used. I think a better translation would be &amp;quot;commodity parts&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;In fact later in the article it says &amp;quot;This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’&amp;quot; It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :&amp;#x2F;&lt;p&gt;That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.</text></comment>