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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.
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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Price.
Also, how many parent think, "Little Jimmy should have a programmable set of Lego!"
TC Logo and Dacta were also great toys (one of my teachers wrote some of the documentation), but there just wasn't a big market.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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...
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
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.
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.
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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.
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
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?
I think that society today is more interested in quick results then in long term effects. When a child is restless, parents seem to just want them to quiet down and look for the easiest ways out. When a parent is too busy with their own lives, the TV should not become a baby sitter. Why? There is no independent thought going on, the child is simply entertained. The child is not forced to think about what is happening in most cases because the answer is inevitably answered later on in the show, if there even is a question to ponder. Parents should never be too busy for their child, if that is the case, they shouldn't have had one at all. I am no sociologist, but one thing that makes me believe that sticking children in front of a TV does a-lot more bad then good is watching my father getting older. Last year all he did was watch TV, even educational things like the discovery channel. I noticed that gradually his mind became a little duller, you could tell by the way that he spoke. He couldn't take it anymore, he even noticed that he was slowing down. Now he works for my sister's school doing odd computer jobs, and he is back to a sort of "normal".
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.
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).
No, just ridiculously high price.
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.
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?
Also, there are no good, cool sets to buy anymore. It's all Bionicle or sets that are 90% "unique" pieces. Every time i go to the toy store i hope to find something along the lines of Space Police or Ice Station or any of the other good sets, and they just don't exist. Therefore, Lego doesn't get my money.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Honestly, I don't see how that's a bad thing. I always thought the Star Wars sets were a bad idea, no matter how neat it is to have a little Lego Emperor. You get the kid a model kit if he wants a model Millenium Falcon. Lego's for building stuff without instructions. Sure, sell the sets, it keeps the kids busy for the rest of Christmas day, but at least pretend you can take it apart and turn it into something else. What's your kid supposed to do when he takes the thing apart the next day and all he has are irregular slanty bricks with Rebel Alliance logos printed on them and Millenium Falcon hull sections? You can't very well go and build castle turrets out of R2D2's head.
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.