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Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms
nick58b writes "Lego, in response to the worst financial loss in its history, has announced they will stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products. This would include Mindstorms, one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood to be in such dire financial straits. If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
The Mindstorm line of stuff was really awesome.. what happened? Poor sales?
"one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." That happens to be your opinion. I would argue that erector sets rule!!
Too many of the new lego products have so few generic bricks and too many specialist bricks that can't easily be used for other things, eg, you can build a lego buggy into, um, a slightly different buggy, but not a lot else.
Get back to providing big bags of ordinary bricks, and encourage creativity!
Jolyon
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I'm not sure the price of these toys is the problem. Toys in general aren't exactly cheap these days. Neither are video games, and video games seem to be what is the most appealing to children these days. So what we might need to look into is why expensive video games are more interesting than expensive toys where children have to actually think to use them. Or did I just answer my own question?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
It may be a change in how children play from then until now. From what I see, a lot of parents just stick their children in front of TVs now to get them to be content. I think many people need to take a good look at the benefits that these kinds of creative toys have to offer for young learners.
The Mindstorms stuff is great, and it's a shame to see it killed. Can't help but think it was too expensive though, several times I've looked at buying a set and reluctantly decided it's too expensive. Lego's always been expensive though, so maybe they know their market.
I'm actually quite happy they're killing the movie tie-in stuff, because the sets seem to be mostly specialist blocks that are fairly useless outside the movie setting. More of a "play set" than a construction set.
Hopefully they will focus on the stuff that makes them different from the usual single-purpose fad toys.
I've kept my eye on Lego, even though I haven't purchased much for years. My greatest disappointment is the "special" pieces that are now so common. All the special pieces detract from your ability to make new and interesting things with multiple sets.
It's time to go back to castles and space ships and cities.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Is to continue making Mindstorms. And also the Legos they used to make. Not the 3-piece Bionic-shits they have nowadays, but the good old fashioned multiblock things which allowed for imagination and weren't pre-chewn.
Just look at those "Bionic" Legos or whatever they are. I'm not surprised they make a loss by selling those. They're ugly, they're no fun, they're not Lego. They're just crap.
Bring back the old Lego! Duplo, the Lego, Technic Legos and Mindstorms! That's all what you need.
The damn things cost too much and you can't make much with the sets anymore. All those one use, custom shapped pieces suck.
The problem with Lego sets in recent years has been the fact that they are very specialized. You used to be able to buy sets that allowed for lots of imagination, such as "pirate", "city", and "space" legos. Now, all I see is "Star Wars: Episode I" or other such sets that don't inspire the imagination in the slightest.
When I was a kid, Lego was about the blocks. That's what they do well. Theme parks, CD Roms, and expensive movie character licensing are not blocks. You're in the block business. Time to get back to the block business.
I for one am happy to see that Lego is making some serious changes. I disagree that it is the youth that is to blame. I have several young cousins that love to play with Lego but I see them less and less impressed with the "put these 4 custom pieces together and you have a Star-Jedi-Saurus-O-Tron-Laser-Car-Thingy". In my opinion Lego took to much to the 'build it once' toys and todays youth, just like in the good old days gets its real pleasure from the huge collection of small blocks with which you can build a House, a Plane, a Car or even a Spaceship.
Just before christmass I walked into a newly found Lego store at Valley Fair Mall (popular luxury mall in San Jose) and was discusted by the choices offered. Crappy replica's of crappy movies and stories that would not add anything of value to a kid's Lego collection other then a bunch of unusable custom pieces. Let alone the rediculous prices.
Rethink your strategy Lego. What worked in the past will really work in the future, there is still time since there is still no competition!
No.
Geeks can think and imagine. You are turning you 2 year old into a person that has to have flashly lights to be entertained.
Sorry, but for 100$ you get a a64 3000+. You know, 1024KiB high speed cache, 6.4GB/s HT io, ect.
Those little microcontrollers cost you 5$ at most if you buy a few 1000.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It's no wonder that lego is losing money. They seem to be putting a heck of a lot of their resources into stuff like Bionicle. Have you seen those things? There are like 10 pieces, they are not standard brick, and you can only make one thing out of them.
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The real problem Lego is facing right now (let's hope they realize it) is they produce too much custom pieces. Every set has at least 5 - 10 custom bricks and therefore:
1) costs much to produce
2) contains less ordinary pieces to reduce the costs
3) Since it contains less pieces and the ones it contains are custom, there's very little play value to justify the cost.
I would suggest Lego to:
1)reduce custom pieces. Kids are suppose to have fantasy you know... I remember I put two triangles together and pretend it was a star destroyer...
2)kill most of the cinema stuff. Starwars stuff is ok (meaning it's well done and designed). reduce cutom pieces and completely kill the other series ( If they can't make other movies with the same quality, then it's a no go.)
3)Kill bionicles!!!! (what in the world are those things? are they LEGO at all? and they DO contain very few pieces and they're mostly custom!!!! They're model kits, not LEGO!)
4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?
Anyway, probably Lego is facing the usual toy VS digital dilemma where most of the kids don't want dull toys and prefer videgames... anyway, I really believe the company isn't facing the crisis for the good... A few steps in the same direction and Lego is gone.
I don't know about 20 years ago, but 35 years ago I used to play with plain rectangular Lego blocks and generic wheels. I had to use my own mind and imagination to assemble these general-purpose blocks into the wide variety of things I wanted to build.
From the look of today's Lego sets, children play today by using the custom single-purpose pieces to assemble a verbatim copy of the picture on the box.
Wait for detail on this. A reporter penned those lines, not the company. And they are somewhat vague. Does this mean that the company will stop production immediately? Does it mean that it will stop pursuing new lines? Does it mean heavy winnowing of the non-profitable lines of production? Remember that you are reading a reporter's version of what the company is doing, and the reporter is not being all that detailed. Wait for an announcement from the company.
As the father of 7 and 8 year old boys, the elder of which has quite a collection of Bionicles, I've observed one little tidbit about Lego: if you lose or break a piece, it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to replace it (No Bionicle Pun Intended ;).
What does this have to do with their financial success? A lot, IMHO. It certainly has affected our brand loyalty. As Kewl as Bionicles are, we have tried to steer our boyz towards products made by more consumer friendly companies, such as K'nex.
I know there's more to running a company, but this to me says they still Just Don't Get It.
Mark
Am I the only one who has noticed that Lego barely sells a kit (in stores) that require any effort or concentration to complete?
When I was younger (here we go....), toy stores always had a great selection of the classic Technics kits. The large, complicated kits seemed to be the hottest items, because they were *challenging* and *interesting*.
Today, most of the sets I see are low-piece count, over-simplifed, plug-the-head-into-the-pelvic-chassis Bionicle garbage, which seems only to make the statement that kids today aren't interested in anything unless it's presented as a completely non-cerebral AARRRGGGHHH-type of monster package.
This really is a shame. I'll never stop appreciating the endless hours I spent creating machines of every type imaginable, and can't help but to think that my exposure to Lego helped to form a little bit of who I am today.
I don't know what a childhood of building Bionicles might do to kid, expect possibly make them wish their parents were cool enough to buy them a toy that doesn't require assembly, like the kid next door.
And that's a sad thing
It costs $10 USD to buy a small toy consisting of no more than 20 or 30 pieces. In my day, you could buy a thousand piece bucket of blocks for $40 (adjusted for inflation). Now they can't even sell 1000 piece buckets, and a 150 piece model is damn near $35. Meanwhile, there are lego compatible blocks which are just as good, but way cheaper.
Lego needs to stop overcharging for their product if they expect to prosper. If they do, I'll buy 'em.
Could the less use of legos be due to video games???? I think so. Why use your imaginagtion when someone else can do it for you.
Evolution or ID?
Add that to the cost of making the plastic blocks themselves.
Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
I mean, a microcontroller with three inputs and outputs, 32 kB RAM, and some ROM (512 kiB IIRC) has to cost at least $100
If you think that a microcontroller with 32kB RAM and 512 KB ROM costs >$100 you have never priced one. A microcontroller such as a PICmicro, an Atmel, a Zilog, and so on costs at most $10 for a "deluxe" version with about 30 I/O pins and Flash memory. What Lego is using is most likely a pre-programmed chip w/o Flash, which are about 1/3 of the price. A 512 KB FlashROM chip costs about $6. These are RETAIL prices, what you can get one single chip for. Lego probably gets them for a fraction of the price since they need quite a few of the things.
I am willing to bet that most of the money from the cost of a Mindstorms kit goes towards marketing and product development. Not towards manufacturing. I'm sure the software inside (and outside) the mindstorms thing cost much more to develop than the hardware.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
When we found out we were having a boy
Because girls aren't supposed to build robots? Don't tell that to my six year old Natasha, whose favorite playtime is spent building K'Nex Battlemechs and Bandai Gundams with her dad.
1953 just called. They want their gender biases back.
Sheesh.
Town, Space, Castle.
I had more fun with the basic themed sets (although I never had any castle sets, just town and space) because there were enough generic pieces that you could be really creative.
The merchandise tie-ins and specialty sets really tarnished the company's sterling reputation for making simple toys that really inspired kids to create.
The sad commentary on our time is that given a choice, kids today would rather have a video game than a Lego set.
Lego should go back to basics...perhaps reissue old but favorite sets for those who wish to recapture the past.
I still remember the little spaceship my parents bought me when we visited Legoland in Denmark. As I recall it was set number 918: Space Transport. I still have the 4x1 bricks that have "LL 918" printed on the side.
-Crolis
So, I thought "just how expensive are these things these days"... I went over to Amazon and entered Lego in the search.
Green Lego Base
$7 for a 10 inch square plastic base??!?
I shudder to think how much my parents paid for all the legos that I had when I was a kid. Then again, maybe they were not so expensive back then (70s).
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
Compare the quality of Lego blocks to Megablocks. The Megablocks are noticably lower in quality. This subject has been debated in Lego circles for years. The conclusion is that you can't get the quality for a lower price.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Exactly.
In the heyday of Lego, (late 1980's-early 1990's IMHO) you had a few specialized parts and mostly rather generic parts. You could build many different things out of a kit, sometimes even coming up with things better that what the kit was intended for. For example, I was able to build a church for my Lego town out of leftover castle parts.
Now it's all specialized crap. You can only build one thing that looks halfway decent. What's the fun in that?
I'm afraid that Lego is not returning to its roots (building blocks), but may just cut the licensed products (Star Wars, Harry Potter) and concentrate on its own Bionicles line.
I was not thrilled to see that my second grader brought home a Bionicles novella from the Scholastic book fair (which is increasingly a toy fair), especially after I looked at it and saw a grammatical error in the book's very first sentence. Lego has a whole mythology about Bionicles, and that's attractive to kids. But my son lost a couple essential pieces of his Bionicle within days of getting it, and I'm not going to encourage this overpriced, intellectually shallow, proprietary product line as a hobby.
Unfortunately, I could not find more generic Lego blocks in my Christmas shopping. There were some overpriced ($30-$40) Star Wars kits, and a space shuttle for $100, but nothing I wanted to buy. I'm beginning to associate Lego with brands like Scholastic and Disney, that have turned their once-respected product lines into brands of dumb, overpriced junk.
When a word is imported from another language, it's perfectly OK to modify its forms to fit the target language's conventions.
There are benefits to this. It keeps your language more consistent. It means you don't have to learn the inflection rules of as many languages. You don't have to learn the etymology of the words you're using to decide if it's even appropriate to apply those rules.
To me, "a lego" is a Lego piece (they're not all bricks) . The plural is "legos". Nevermind that "a lego" doesn't exist in Danish and can't be pluralized on those grounds. This is English.
Similarly, to me, "a virus" is an entity that uses a host to do its replication for it. The plural is "viruses". Nevermind that in the source language (Greek? Latin? Why should I have to know? This is English), "virus" (like "air") is not a count noun and can't be pluralized on those grounds.
Both "viruses" and "Legos" are perfectly OK. Curiously, the /. nitpickers, as a group, seem to like one and not the other.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
the problem is that very few engineering minded kids have parents that are the same way. I absolutely devoured everything engineering-wise.. my father was smart enough to break the bank on the family's very limited budget and buy me the electronics kits, erector set's and other items like that. He knew nothing about electronics, chemistry or engineering outside of being a construction worker/contractor plus working in a foundry.
I was lucky.
I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.
On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Lego maniacs out there would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.
What's to stop a third party making mindstorms-like devices for lego?
Small embedded processor running embedded OS. Maybe even compatible with old mindstorms programs. Small interpreter running on the OS for simple (kiddy) programs but otherwise full system call / thread / malloc power for the nerds.
What's more, it's an opportunity to fix some of the problems people complain about. Too expensive? Don't sell with high profit margins. They can't be that expensive to produce. Not enough io channels? Put more in. Not updated often enough? Update them yourself. Open the specifications while you're at it.
What are the patent issues with this? Because after all, all it would be is a small computer which can fit into lego constructions. How can they stop you selling that?
It can't be that difficult. Couple of electronic engineers, computer scientist, and you're done.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.